Useful for 2012
December 31, 2011
This is not search related, but we noted the item and wanted to share it with our two or three readers.
Privacy is a luxury that few can afford in the Internet age that we live in. However, technology allows you to use this fact to your advantage. The days of anonymous prank calls are over, thanks to the new reverse phone service WhoIsThisPhone.com.
KillerStartups reported on this free and convenient reverse-phone search service in the article “WhoIsThisPhone.com Reverse-Phone Search.”
WhoIsThisPhone.com allows anyone to research its extensive phone database and find a phone number and exact geographical location from any caller who may be trying to hide his or her identity.
The description states:
People calling you up in the middle of the night and hanging up without speaking a word, people leaving strange messages into your machine, people who keep on calling and requesting to talk to someone that you have already explained doesn’t live there. WhoIsThisPhone.com is going to assist you in all such scenarios. You’ll get to know who’s behind such calls. And once you know as much, you’ll be able to begin doing what it takes to make them stop.
While the basic site is free, there are marginal charges that can be incremented by having reports generated.
Jasmine Ashton, December 31, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
New People Search: Just What You Wanted
December 10, 2011
Killer Startups reported on a new search engine designed specifically to find people in the post Zopeo.com Online People Search.
Zopeo seeks to be a global white pages and according to it’s website, has a mission to provide the most comprehensive people search on the web and to empower and enable people everywhere to search for their family and friends on the Web. The new system allows users to search by inputting the name of the person that you are looking for, along with the place where you think that they may live.
the article states:
The search will take just a couple of seconds, and if it’s indeed successful then you’ll be learning not just that person’s whereabouts and contact information but also a detailed 20 year history. So, catching up with any friends that had vanished from your life is a piece of cake.
In addition to getting the current address and phone number of long lost friends or family members, you can also use Zopeo to run background checks on potentially shady characters. The background checks are interesting, and if you have not probed an individual, you may want to dive in and check out the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. Zopeo delivers known aliases / maiden names, relatives, current and past roommates, property ownership, nationwide criminal records, bankruptcies, tax liens, civil judgments, assets, Web site ownership, and more. Put on your tin foil hat and give Zopeo a go.
Jasmine Ashton, December 10, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
A Surprise: Google Employees on Privacy
November 8, 2011
That Google lacks privacy protection should be news to no one. However, that a couple of its employees admit it is surprising. In his Slight Paranoia blog, Christopher Soghoian reports, “Two honest Google employees: our products don’t protect your privacy.” He opens,
Two senior Google employees recently acknowledged that the company’s products do not protect user privacy. This is quite a departure from the norm at Google, where statements about privacy are usually thick with propaganda, mistruths and often outright deception.
The first employee cited is Will DeVries, a privacy lobbyist for the company. In response to an article Soghoian wrote about the need for journalists to learn more about computer security, DeVries commented with wholehearted agreement. He added that journalists should take time to learn about and use free security measures. Soghoian extrapolates: if Google security were tight, wouldn’t DeVries specifically name Google products here? Perhaps, but this may be a bit of a stretch.
The next comment is more straightforward. In a conference in Kenya, Soghoian spoke on the same panel as Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist (that’s his real title.) In that discussion, Cerf agreed with Soghoian’s observation that securely encrypting user data fundamentally conflicts with the company’s ad-based business model. That is quite the admission, and confirms that Google is unlikely to put user privacy first anytime soon. Information or disinformation? We will be asking this question frequently in the run up to 2012.
Cynthia Murrell November 8, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google, Search and Privacy
November 2, 2011
With all the excitement surrounding Google+, you may not even know about Google’s first social networking attempt, Buzz. Few noticed the failing service, particularly the privacy concerns being handled by the FTC.
We noticed.
The Federal Trade Commission announced it has finalized a settlement with Google. Complaints centered around Buzz, which created a social network out of people’s Gmail contacts. The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint, and the FTC took action. Google is now required to create a privacy program and submit to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years.
We learn more in the MediaPost News’ story, “FTC, Google Settle Buzz Privacy Case.” It tells us:
Google also promised that it will obtain people’s express consent before sharing their information more broadly than its privacy policy allowed at the time of collection… While Google has been the subject of several complaints by privacy advocates, this case marked the first time the FTC filed charges against the company. The FTC alleged that Google violated its own privacy policy and used deceptive tactics when it launched its social network Buzz.
Several Gmail users have filed lawsuits in addition to this action, a class-action suit settled with $8.5 million. Google announced earlier this month that it was going to end Buzz. Buzz is dead. We think that search may also be on its way out. Google is changing quickly, and like privacy, the notion of precision and recall is undergoing what I think of as revisionism.
Andrea Hayden, November 2, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Spotlight: Mindbreeze Information Pairing
November 2, 2011
We wanted to continue our spotlight on Mindbreeze, a unit of the highly regarded Fabasoft. You will want to bookmark the Mindbreeze blog at this link and take note of “Information Pairing. Knowledge Match Making for Your Company.”
With companies flopping like caught trout in the bottom of a fishing boat, the ability to locate the person in your organization with information germane to your work is essential.
The challenge, according to Mindbreeze, is to locate the individual with the experience, information, and insight to assist in answering a business question. Walking around no longer works because many companies have employees who are at client locations, working from a different facility, or responding to email from an airport waiting lounge.
The blog article asserts:
Fabasoft Mindbreeze has the answer: Information pairing. This involves the boundless networking of company relevant information within an enterprise or organization and placing it in the Cloud. In my opinion acting in this way in all business issues is reliable, dynamic and profitable – the basis for competitive advantage.
The method relies on the Mindbreeze core technology which delivers information with pinpoint accuracy. The write up continues:
Existing identities and access rights to company-internal and Cloud data remain preserved. The user only receives information displayed for which he/she has access rights for. This ensures that Fabasoft Mindbreeze fulfills the strictest compliance requirements. Furthermore, Mindbreeze is certified according to all relevant security standards.
The Mindbreeze technology for “information pairing” allows in a unique way to enrich documents and information in a secure and highly efficient way with enterprise and even content from the Cloud. Information gets dynamically annotated with “knowledge” extracted and harvested from cloud services (public and private ones), e.g. like Wikipedia or Fabasoft Folio Cloud. This is a very innovative and impressive way to combine information effectively and annotate existing and preprocessed entities on the fly.
So for instance: You need to know everything about a lead? Mindbreeze combines every information in your enterprise, like your CRM and connects the information with suitable content from sources like Wikipedia, LinkedIn, social media like Facebook and even on your web analytics account and comes up with a unified view of all the information that’s available for this lead.
Unlike some search and content processing vendors, Fabasoft has taken care to ensure that privacy and security work as the organization intends. Fabasoft and Mindbreeze hold SAS70 and ISO 27001 certifications for their cloud services. This is unique in the enterprise search space. According the write up, the focus has been on putting “values” about these important norms in the firm’s software and systems.
Take a look at www.mindbreeze.com.
Stephen E. Arnold, November 2, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Data Breach Leaves 5 Million Patients Holding the Bag
October 11, 2011
A data breach of military health care records from the past 19 years has left nearly 5 million past and current patients vulnerable to identity theft and other acts of malintent.
Tricare, the healthcare program serving current and former military service members, revealed that contractor Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) lost backup tapes containing health data and other personal information of about 4.9 million people. The tapes were stolen out of an SAIC employee’s car during a Sept.13 burglary.
Tricare released a statement saying that the risk of harm to patients has been judged low and this is why the do not intend to provide the people affected with credit monitoring services.
According to the Information Week article, Military Health Plan Data Breach Threatens 4.9 Million, Ruby Raley, director of healthcare solutions at IT integration and security company said:
Unlike HIPAA, FTC regulations don’t require entities to sign agreements with ‘business associates’ that hold third parties to the same standards when handling sensitive data. Also, HIPAA regulations require organizations to provide a year of credit monitoring to anyone who may have been affected by a breach. They’re only [offering] fraud protection for 90 days.
While no financial records were stolen, this incident leads us to wonder whether government enitites should be forced to follow HIPAA regulations, instead of less strict FTC regulations. This may prevent similar problems from occuring down the road.
Jasmine Ashton, Oct 11, 2011
Paving Stones of Good Intentions
October 9, 2011
Even Orwell didn’t foresee this, not specifically. From Kindergarten through college, students are now subjected to more forms of monitoring than I could have conceived of when I was a little rabble rouser. From cameras to RFID badges, it’s an entirely different world.
Now Michael Morris, is a lieutenant with the University Police at California State University-Channel Islands, is calling on universities to take surveillance to a whole new level. NetworkWorld reports on this in “Privacy Nightmare: Data Mine & Analyze all College Students’ Online Activities.” That’s right, the good lieutenant recommends recording every little thing college students do online and analyzing the data to predict and prevent “large-scale acts of violence on campus.” What’s more, it would be easy enough to do with today’s data management tools. Wrote Morris,
Many campuses across the country . . . provide each student with an e-mail address, personal access to the university’s network, free use of campus computers, and wired and wireless Internet access for their Web-connected devices. Students use these campus resources for conducting research, communicating with others, and for other personal activities on the Internet, including social networking. University officials could potentially mine data from their students and analyze them, since the data are already under their control. The analysis could then be screened to predict behavior to identify when a student’s online activities tend to indicate a threat to the campus.
Take a moment to reflect on the side effects of such a large-scale invasion of privacy. What other behavior, unrelated to potential violence, will be “predicted?” And how will those predictions be acted upon? The possibilities are endless.
Look, I get it. I once attended Virginia Tech, after all, and now I have a child in college myself. Not much scares me more than visions of some nut-job with guns descending on that campus. But I also realize that throughout history, fear has been the key to gaining citizen acceptance of the unacceptable. And now we have technology that allows the unacceptable to reach heights like never before.
Cynthia Murrell October 9, 2011
Recrawl Searches Your Browser History
September 19, 2011
You know you saw a website, but you don’t have the URL and you can’t remember how you got there. Ever happened to you? It happens to everyone in our culture of technological ADHD. Shallow thinking is encouraged by our “click and browse” society. For all of us there is help – there is Recawl.
Recawl is a fast and efficient way to find information and pages from your browsing history. The idea was borne out of frustration at not being able to find a page, despite knowing that it had already been visited . . . Recawl automatically indexes every page you visit and lets you do full-text search on the content of all those pages. This makes recalling information from your browsing history much faster & easier, without the need to bookmark anything.
Your history is available for search on any computer via the Recawl site. The extension is currently only available for Chrome. However, we can see a demand for this sort of service, one that elevates or potentially eliminates the bookmarking trend.
This new angle on search of course poses security questions. No doubt privacy will be a concern.
Emily Rae Aldridge, September 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Breaking Relevance: The TrackMeKnot Method
July 18, 2011
Okay, with ProQuest, Cambridge Scientific, and Dialog about to jump into the statistical fog of relevance, I fell pretty glum. Most old school searchers prefer to type in explicit commands; for example
b 15
ss cc=77? AND cc=76?? AND esop
When the new “fuzzified” version of the commercial search system for ProQuest, Cambridge Scientific, and Dialog-type users, good luck with that. In the new commercial systems, the old school, brute force, Boolean approach would return consistent results search in and search out. Take it to the bank.
Change is afoot so queries will return somewhat unpredictable results depending on what pointers get jiggled in an index update.
If we shift to the free Web search engines, the notion of relevance is based on lots of “signals”. A signal is something that allows the search system to disambiguate or add context to an action. If you are running around an airport, the mobile search wizards want to look at your search history and hook those signals to your wandering GPS input. The result is search done for you.
Why is relevance lousy? Well, search engine optimization is to blame. The focus on selling targeted ads is a contributor. And there are some interesting software tools that aim to confuse certain traffic analysis systems. So far, no one wants to confuse the ProQuest, Cambridge Scientific, and Dialog-type systems, but the Web search world is like catnip.
One of our readers alerted us to TrackMeKnot, which is an obfuscation software designed to defeat certain types of usage tracking. Here’s what the developers say:
TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. To better simulate user behavior TrackMeNot uses a dynamic query mechanism to ‘evolve’ each client (uniquely) over time, parsing the results of its searches for ‘logical’ future query terms with which to replace those already used.
If you want to cover your search clicks, give it a whirl. Obfuscation methods, if used by lots of people, may have an adverse impact on relevance, particularly when personalization is enabled. Lucky me.
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com (www.pandia.com), publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search.
Facebook Face Play No Big Surprise
June 14, 2011
You might be living under a rock if you haven’t heard about Facebook’s newest addition to its social network–facial recognition software. That’s right – the beloved social network is building a database of their user’s faces and telling us it’s all to make our lives easier. As discussed in “Facebook Quietly Switches on Facial Recognition Tech by Default” the controversial feature allows users “to automatically provide tags for the photos uploaded” by recognizing facial features of your friends from previously uploaded photos. Yet again, Facebook finds themselves under fire their laissez-faire attitude towards privacy.
This latest Facebook technology is being vilified. It has been called “creepy,” “disheartening,” and even “terrifying.” These are words that would usually be reserved for the likes of Charles Manson or Darth Vader, not an online social network. The biggest backlash seems to come from the fact that the didn’t “alert its international stalkerbase that its facial recognition software had been switched on by default within the social network.” This opt-out, instead of opt-in, attitude is what is upsetting the masses. Graham Cluely, a UK-based security expert says that “[y]et again, it feels like Facebook is eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth.”
To be fair, Facebook released a notice on The Facebook Blog in December 2010that the company was unleashing its “tag suggestions” to United States users and when you hear them describe the technology it seems to be anything, but Manson-esque. In fact, it invokes thoughts of Happy Days. They say that since people upload 100 million tagged photos everyday, that they simply are helping “you and your friends relive everything from that life-altering skydiving trip to a birthday dinner where the laughter never stopped.” They go as far as to say that photo tags are an “essential tool for sharing important moments” and facial recognition just makes that easier.
Google has also been working on facial recognition technology in the form of a smartphone app known as Google Googles and celebrity recognition. However, now Google is claiming to have halted the project because, as Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said “[p]eople could use this stuff in a very, very bad way as well as in a good way.” See “Facebooks’s Again in Spotlight on Privacy”.
So who’s right? Facebook by moving forward or Google by holding up its facial recognition technology?
It seems to me that Google is just delaying the inevitable. Let’s face it. As a Facebook user my right to my privacy may be compromised the second I sign up in exchange for what Facebook offers.
Technology, like the facial recognition software, is changing the social media landscape, and I suppose I should not be surprised when the company implements its newest creation even when it puts my privacy at risk.
Is it creepy?
Probably and users should be given an opportunity to opt-in, not out. Is it deplorable. No. It’s our option to join and Facebook is taking full advantage of it.
Jennifer Wensink, June 14, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
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