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.

They dropped their "don't be evil" motto for a reason

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Google has been inappropriately storing your search records for a long time now, but it looks like they're far from being the only one.

You might not know who's watching

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It's important to know that in this case, the spy had physical access to the machine and there was a light that came on to tell the victim that the webcam was active. However, you should always be careful if you have a webcam installed to cover or turn it when not in use.

Down the hole. Who needs those records anyway?

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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.

(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.

Give us your laptop. Or else.

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Schneier covers the recently released US policy for laptop seizure:

The U.S. government has published its policy: they can take your laptop anywhere they want, for as long as they want, and share the information with anyone they want

Watch out for unexpected surprises.

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I have always said that the more someone knows about you the easier it is to destroy you. Hence we have an example of people defrauding lonely love seekers through e-dating sites.

It's easy to manipulate if you know a few personal details about someone. Salespeople have been doing it for as long as there's been salespeople.

University of Maryland

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They sent out mailings that had the SSNs on the outside envelope. But don't worry! They're offering a free year of credit monitoring!

Whee.

Instead, do something useful and take advantage of Maryland's Credit Freeze law to actually protect yourself rather than get ripped off by credit monitoring

Prefer to stay hidden?

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A commenter pointed out this checklist of tips for controlling your data and your privacy and I agree that it's got some good advice so here's the link. Most of all, I credit them for being one of the first articles I've found online about ID theft that actually mentions credit freezes (other than mine of course).

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This should be interesting. If China didn't take some serious precautions when implementing RFID for their tickets, we should be hearing any day now about people who remotely cloned someone else's ticket and got into the game denying access to the others.

Or, since passport information is stored on the ticket as well, someone with a scanner can find anyone from a given country should they wish to target someone based on their nationality. Let's see what happens.