Rights you don't know about are as good as nonexistant

With the stark increase in flight cancellations this year, it's in your best interests to have some idea of how to fight back.

Data breaches are about negligence; every time

(Image is in the Public Domain)

Details of how to access the information - which included home addresses, place of employment and credit card details - were sold through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.

And, again, if these companies would stop holding our credit card numbers far past the date that we used them, we wouldn't be having this problem.

Update

Best Western is contradicting the story saying that it's exaggerated. More importantly this:

Most importantly, whereas the reporter asserted the recent compromise of data for past guests from as far back as 2007, Best Western purges all online reservations promptly upon guest departure.

If this is true, then how did they lose anything? Did they? The details are unclear.

Hey there. Wanna donut!?

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The Wall Street Journal says that Dunkin' Donuts is experimenting with video screens that use facial recognition technology to figure out your age and gender. The screens then display ads targeted specifically to you.

The last thing we need is computers trying to figure out who and what we are so they can target ads to us.

Beware the puddle militia! They're gonna git ya!

(Image is in the Public Domain)

Privacy nuts like me have been warning people for years that tracking and tagging of all people will start with the kids. It's easy to teach people to accept personal tracking devices by giving it to them when they're young. But how do you do that? Use parents' practically fanatical protective instinct to protect their kids against a largely imaginary threat.

Companies that use scare tactics, especially when inflaming peoples fears of extreme and rare issues, are complete and utter scum.

It's totally safe... come closer.

(Image is used under the Pixabay license)

These infomercials are pretending to be news so you'll give them far more credibility that you would if you knew it was an infomercial.

CNN has a story covering four of the new annoying fees you might see at the airport and how you might be able to avoid them. But then there's this…

By the way, there's plenty of evidence that the airlines are just getting started with their new fees. Once passengers are used to paying for beverages, checked luggage and "free" award tickets, it's on to bigger and better things for the chronically mismanaged airline industry. What's next? No one knows.

And that's a very good reason to follow this advice:

Of course, the best way around all of these fees is to fly on an airline that doesn't have them. Southwest Airlines still allows you to check two bags at no extra charge. JetBlue still serves free drinks and snacks and charges $25 less than the big airlines for unaccompanied minors. Supporting these less fee-prone companies will hasten the inevitable demise of the airlines that erroneously believe they can surcharge their way back to a profit.

Down the hole. Who needs those records anyway?

(Image used under: Creative Commons 4.0 [SRC])

Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool for evaluating whether to cover individual consumers: a health "credit report" drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on more than 200 million Americans.

It's important to know that these prescription reports and others like it are not regulated at all while credit reporting companies are heavily regulated, and still are a problem sometimes.

No more free drinks for you.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

In the mad rush to create a value-adding product at the expense of privacy (wow, where have we heard that before?), Google execs failed to consider that they too might be on the losing end of Google Streetview. A privacy group has just released a ton of personal information that could cause all kinds of problems for Google exec Larry Page. The key is that the information was gathered only from Google Streetview and in about 30 minutes.

Hopefully it will lead to positive changes to the service, but it's far more likely to lead to an obscuring of just the Google execs' data.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

As with most new search engines, it's not that impressive out of the box. It doesn't seem to return much in the way of more relevant results than any other page, but the makers of Cuil (pronounced COOL) are saying that they index more pages than any other search engine. Because their algorithms analyze the content of the pages and categorize that way, in theory, they should return better results.

Their advantages are a clean, simple interface (like Google), but unlike Google, they don't keep logs and records of your searches to track you. As this is my only real complaint against Google, if they could just do as well as Google with the search results, but have better privacy, then perhaps Google's time is done.