TED published an excellent talk: Why Privacy Matters, by Glenn Greenwald.

Seldom do I call an online lecture “a must for all audience“, but the TED lecture by Glenn Greenwald is worth such an enforcement. Glenn Greenwald is one of the key reporters who published material based on the leaks of Edward Snowden. He also wrote a good book about it called “No Place to Hide”; a book on which I wrote a review about 6 months ago.

If you know that privacy is important, but cannot explain why people who’ve done nothing wrong need it, or worse yet, if you really do not see why a surveillance state is bad also for law-abiding citizens, then you must listen to this. It packs hours of social, psychological, and public policy discussions into a few minutes.

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I was quoted by The Enquirer saying that we shall all assume that data (from wearables and otherwise) that is collected by service providers will never be deleted. The data collected by wearables is only as protected as the network that holds it – and it is likely to be stored indefinitely.

“The trend today, given the ever-decreasing cost of storage, is to store data forever. A CIO will prefer to pay a bit more for a little more disk space than risk his job and company prosperity by deciding to discard data that is one day determined to have been useful.”

EDITED TO ADD: This story was also pubished by USA Today, and others.

Shodan is a search engine for computers. It allows to search for hosts on the Internet not by the text they serve but by their technical properties as they reflect in responses to queries. The crawler Shodan uses to build its index does not read text that websites emit when visited, but instead it reads the information that the machine provides when probed.

Like most other technologies, this is another dual-use technology. It has both legitimate and malicious uses. The tool can be used for research, but it can be, and indeed has been, used for vicious purposes. Shodan will readily map and report Internet-accessible web-cams, traffic lights, and other IoT devices, including those with lax protection, such as those using default passwords or no passwords for log-in.

So is Shodan bad? Not at all. Those are exactly the forces that make us all more secure.

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The revelations made by Edward Snowden did not show us anything that we never thought possible. It did reveal, however, that many of the things that were possible in theory found their way to reality. Those revelations also gave opportunity for many of the chronic paranoids and conspiracy-theorists to say “I told you". Fact is, digital life causes us to rely on more and more service providers, in the shape of government agencies and private organizations, and those providers were now caught violating our trust. When we buy products and services, we trust their provider to follow the norms we believe it follows. When such trust breaks, we need to think what next. In my opinion, this situation forms an opportunity for Europe to catch up.

Continue reading "A gift from Snowden to the European economy"