I've never liked Mint.com. Not because they're bad at what they do (they're not), but because you have to drop your trousers to take advantage of it. So you get a little money management help, so what? You have to give away your password to do it. Not only that, Mint is (surprise, surprise) using all that juicy data you provide for their own purposes.

For now, it seems that they're not actually telling you who purchased what, but there's no telling when and if they'll start selling your valuable personal data to 3rd parties (maybe they are already). Until then, showing truly anonymous purchase information is kind of neat so long as they don't take it further than that.

So the first problem is that Australia is in a head-to-head race with the UK to see which country can lose their freedoms first. The newest chapter in this sad saga of Australia's descent into becoming a China clone is a high school that requires fingerprint identification for students to check in.

Though the privacy violating principal foolishly thought that by tracking fingerprints he could defeat students who used other students to "swipe in" for them previously. However, research which is available online shows how to defeat these with only gummi bears.

So if you're an Australian student at Gosford's Henry Kendall High School who thinks this privacy invasion is crap, check out this article that shows the research you can use to defeat the fingerprint scanners.

Maybe you haven't heard of this yet, but a pilot working for ExpressJet refused to use the new nudie scanners installed at his airport. They offered to pat him down instead, but according to him:

"Pat down is misleading," Roberts explained. "They concentrate on the area between the upper thighs and torso, and they're not just patting people's arms and legs, they're grabbing and groping and prodding pretty aggressively."

I've written about this previously as it's been reported that refusing the scanner will get you a ''super-sized'' pat-down almost like a punishment and this experience seems to confirm that.

Peter Pietra, the head of privacy for the TSA is a reasonable guy who I met at a conference once. I asked him about this issue and he stated that the procedures seemed to work as intended. People have the right to opt out, but must be patted down in the process. I asked him about the "aggressive pat-down" and he said this:

There is no retaliatory pat-down for people who decline AIT. There used to be several types of pat-downs, but there are now only two (standard, and resolution). People who decline AIT or metal detector, for that matter, get the standard pat-down, but our standard pat-down changed about a month ago …. There was a flurry of media attention about a month ago on it, and some complaints following the news articles, but not a lot. My rough recollection is a dozen or fewer complaints specific to the new pat-down.

Along with my previous talks with him, this is the second time he's assured me that there is no special treatment of people who refuse the scan. While I'm positive there are people who abuse their authority or make things tougher for people who they think make things tough for them (asserting rights which also makes their job harder), here's the thing:

There are two pat-downs and while I don't know what warrants the second, you should only get the first by refusing to be scanned. Therefore, if your pat down is more extensive than what you see old people with heart devices getting, it's time to complain and complain loudly (which is what I believe this pilot has done and good for him). Peter says he thinks there's no problem because he hasn't received many complaints. If you think you've been a victim of retaliation or excessive probing, make sure he hears about it.

Make sure your voice is heard. You can connect with his office here: TSAPrivacy@dhs.gov

Support for the Pilot

There's been a lot of support for him in the airline industry (among workers not officially). Here are some of the industry forums where they're talking about him:

Jetcareers
Expressjetpilots
Flyertalk

This is not surprising.

"Apps" are pieces of software that let Facebook's 500 million users play games or share common interests with one another. The Journal found that all of the 10 most popular apps on Facebook were transmitting users' IDs to outside companies.

The apps, ranked by research company Inside Network Inc. (based on monthly users), include Zynga Game Network Inc.'s FarmVille, with 59 million users, and Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille. Three of the top 10 apps, including FarmVille, also have been transmitting personal information about a user's friends to outside companies.

Once you install a 3rd party application, you no longer have control. Think twice before touching any "app" about how much you care if your information remains private or is sold on the information black market.

Why on Earth would anyone be surprised that when someone has access to a lot of sensitive data about people they know, they'd be tempted to look at it? Check out this story outlining several recent cases of government workers peeping on people with government databases.

Creation of government databases should be limited. Any that are legitimately created must be carefully controlled and restricted to only the people that need it. Breaches of trust should be visible and accounted for.

As far as I'm concerned, private databases owned by companies should fall into the same boat. No one should be tracked and tagged like an animal unless they're a convicted criminal.

Rule number 1: don't trust Facebook or any other marketer with your information. Anything you provide should be carefully researched to see how safe it is then provided only after deciding what risk you face.

Rule number 2: don't use automated processes to share information without even MORE careful research.

Breaking both rules is a new app from Facebook which will allow you (or one of your friends) to violate the privacy of many people at once by uploading your phonebook.

The greatest part is that you don't have to give up your phone number since one of your friends can instead! This is just like how Facebook let friends tell stalkers where to find you or add you to groups so someone who's mad at you can make you look like a pedophile.

Don't you love Facebook?

I'd cry blood before using Facebook Places

I can't imagine broadcasting my current location to the world. There are so many risks that I don't even know where to begin. If you like this feature, good luck and godspeed. Hopefully you don't get robbed, stalked, or worse.

And don't think you're safe just because you think that you have your account set to only allow friends! People's accounts get hijacked all the time letting some other stranger in. Also, your friends may have people in their family or others in their house with access to their computer and thus the things that are posted to your wall. What if a computer gets lost or stolen? What if the people you added aren't who they say they are or if you don't know your real friends as well as you thought you did and they decide to do something with the knowledge that you'll be away from your home or off in a secluded area?

The point is that no matter how unlikely you think those things are, you suffer risks from people knowing your location that you don't otherwise. Even if you don't want to be as risk avoidant as me, the last thing you want is for there to be a way for your location to be broadcast without your consent (which of course is the default option in Facebook).

Even if you feel ok posting where you are sometimes, you don't want it to be automatic or something other people can set for you so turn it off!

1. Find the control for Places in your settings

2. Disable the ability of friends to check you in

Remember to check out the privacy settings page on FB now and then to see if they added new features (which will be set badly by default).

So it's not just Facebook that's full of holes and privacy issues. Twitter has been warned by the Federal Trade Commission for their "serious lapses in data security".

The FTC had originally accused the social media service of making private tweets and the login credentials of users easily available to "hackers" between January and May of 2009. During that time, someone was able to gain administrative access to Twitter's system (and therefore access to thousands of user accounts, passwords, direct messages, and more) simply by using password-guessing software. That user reset numerous user passwords, allowing others to access those accounts.

As is always the case, when not required to provide adequate security or privacy, most companies will do what they can get away with and no more. If there's no penalty for doing a bad job, don't be surprised when they don't.

The city obtained a transcript of Quon’s messages during an investigation to determine whether officers were using their pagers for personal messages. The transcripts showed that Quon had been exchanging sexually explicit messages with his wife, his girlfriend and another SWAT team member.

In the end, the US Supreme Court ruled that for government employees at least, there is no privacy for your use of government furnished equipment.

To me, this is no shocker. What does surprise me is that this made it all the way to the Supreme Court! This guy really wanted someone to blame since obviously someone who's cheating on his wife AND his two girlfriends shouldn't be pointing fingers at himself.

Australia has so much Big Brother nastiness going on, sometimes they make even the UK look tame!

The newest development comes where the government is demanding service providers to store all e-mail and possibly web browsing history for all its subjects citizens.

According to the directive, where internet access is concerned, this means the ISPs must retain the user ID of users, email addresses of senders and recipients of email, the date and time that users logged on and off from a service, and their IP address — whether dynamic or static applied to their user ID.

Like most ideas of this nature, it's sold with a plausible premise of catching criminals, but if innocent people are to accept such an invasion, it must first be shown that:

1. The data actually DOES help catch bad guys.
2. The data won't be abused and misused by the government.

In the US, we fail most consistently on the second. I don't know, but I'm going to guess that Australia's track record isn't a lot better.