Anti-spyware law in California

California has passed and signed an anti-spyware law. This will help to prosecute potential spyware installers. Spyware is generally installed on people's computer without their knowledge. There are pieces of spyware that are also installed that people have unwittingly agreed to. Have you read the accepted terms and agreements of certain software or plug-ins? These sometimes also contain spyware and you'll know it when you see certains things appear that were never there before. You should always be running an anti-spyware program to detect these. If you've never done it, you'll be surprised at how many little snippets of code are running on your computer and you don't know it.

Hopefully the nation will follow California in this as they do many other types of legislation, good or bad.

  Subscribe to this RSS news feed.

I don't understand young people doing this....

Here is an article that really isn't about privacy, but it could be as teens are spilling it all on blogs. They're writing about their lives in these things and not giving themselves privacy. If you don't care about your private life, will anyone else in the future?

I blog for the joy of writing. It helps keep my mind sharp thinking out loud about the things I'm interested in. It's a great way to fully think about what you're doing.

  Subscribe to this RSS news feed.

Some nice tips on privacy...

Here's a little article that gives some good tips on maintaining privacy for both online and offline. One of the things they don't mention here is shredding documents. Whe I thought they were going to talk about offline, this would be an obvious one. You should shred all personal information, bank statements and even some things you may not be sure about. Use a crosscut shredder, it completely makes paper unreadable. Some shredders only do a linear shred which can be pieced together. Remember the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979? Our embassy shredded documents, but because they were a linear shred, the Iranians took the laborious effort of putting them back together. I remember seeing it on a news report back then. I was surprised our government back then didn't have better document destruction.

I like one aspect of this article, registering when making a purchase or wanting more information:

"Rebel against registration. Many sites want you to register so they can collect information about you or, at the least, prove to some bean-counter somewhere that they really do have visitors of a certain demographic."

It's a poor marketing tactic to ask for this when some people clearly this practice. All websites should have an option to get information or buy without a registration.

Search marketing services by RealWebMarketing.com

  Subscribe to this RSS news feed.

I promise not to go overboard

There's one comment I want to make. I won't make this blog become a place for conspiracy theories or a place that thinks there is a CIA man around every corner. I simply want to look at some of the trends related to privacy, both good and bad.

Search marketing services by RealWebMarketing.com

  Subscribe to this RSS news feed.

Shrinking privacy online with new forms of search

All are concerns about online privacy are becoming more important as search engines are looking to personalize the search experience. It looks as though Google, Yahoo and MSN are going to have software tools that will scan your hard drives and documents to create an algorithm which will personalize your online searching. It's this indexing of your data that has a lot of people concerned. I think it would be nice if I had better search results, but at what price? Should the loss of privacy be the trade-off for this new kind of search. I would guess that these search engines will know more about us than they ever have and that's a little spooky.

They want to know more about us, so they can better sell to us. It's bizarre that under the banner of something good for you, you will have less privacy. It's a good thing that we will have a choice.

Search marketing services by RealWebMarketing.com

  Subscribe to this RSS news feed.