Thursday, June 08, 2006

Another reason to avoid MySpace

As reported in New Scientist:

"I am continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

My previous thoughts and paranoia on this issue can be found here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

nothing to do with mySpace:
It is never not funny that everyone looks to PGP for encryption software and security based needs and PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy, you know, it isn't great or good, but pretty good.