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Josh discovered a mysterious $13 fee on his parents' phone bill, and as he tracked down the source of the bogus charge, he learned a lot about cramming. The FCC describes it as "the practice of placing unauthorized, misleading, or deceptive charges on your telephone bill" by third party companies, who bank on you being too confused/distracted/annoyed by your hard-to-read bill to notice.

Read his story here.

My main reason for digging this besides warning (or reminding) you about this practice was the first comment after the article:

Just another example of the disparity between corporations and people. Corporations freely get away doing things that people would go to jail for.

FTC

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Even though the chair of the FTC has clear financial interests in the merger of Google and Doubleclick AND she was on the board deciding if the deal could go through AND she refused to recluse herself, the merger has been approved and there's no sign of any accountability on the way.

But it wasn't a unanimous decision. The Register tells of at least one dissenting member of the FTC who sees vast privacy implications in the future. No kidding.

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A depressing report from a few California universities shows that most people have no idea to what extent their online activities are tracked and used against them. This report doesn't offer any solutions other than to try to opt-out of tracking (if it's even possible to do so) though they also state that many companies find clever ways of circumventing promises not to track and do it anyway.

If you don't want to be tracked, make sure to use adblocking software and turn off images in your e-mail. This removes many of the techniques used to track you.

AT&T

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AT&T is a company who needs to be watched having been recently discovered that they built a custom algorithm to: "crunch through tens of millions of long distance phone records a night to draw up what AT&T calls "communities of interest" — i.e., calling circles that show who is talking to whom".

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If you've been following this breach, the key problem here is two part:

1) TJX is the parent company of several other companies including TJ Maxx. Each of those companies shared data with TJX creating a massive database (and a single target for the hackers).

2) TJX (and others) shouldn't have stored the credit card data in the first place and when they did, they should have used better security.

Though they'll blame "clever hackers" for the breach, the fault instead lies squarely with TJX who's business practice of storing credit cards against people's will along with negligent use of outdated wireless encryption (WEP) first created a giant target and then then left a gaping hole for the bad guys to be able to go and get it.

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Pudding Media offers calling without any toll charges.

The trade-off is that Pudding Media is eavesdropping on phone calls in order to display ads on the screen that are related to the conversation.

Did we really need any further invasion of privacy?

I hope this company falls flat on its face.

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

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Google, trying to hold up their former image of being a rebel company who "doesn't do evil", has proposed a universal privacy standard that they say all companies should follow. The main idea is that there should be a minimum set of standards that everyone agrees to follow when dealing with private user data.

I sure hope it's not their standards since they hold your private data hostage for months.

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Rather than try to prevent people from copying or sharing music with drm, Microsoft has patented a watermarking procedure that will allow them to tag music with IDs that are very hard to remove.

First take: this is bad, bad news. While Ars Technica believes that this could help to get rid of the much hated DRM, I believe the replacement is far worse. Now instead of merely being annoying in preventing you from copying a CD, the RIAA will be able to track music by ID to see where (and who) it came from. If your son shares a song online that's from your CD collection, you will be much easier to find and prosecute.

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First he refused to show his reciept and the Circuit City people blocked his car. Then when he called for the police and they asked for his driver's license, he refused and was arrested.

I'm going to try and follow this case because this guy says there's no law requiring that he show his reciept and also no law requiring that he present ID to the officer. If that's true, I hope he sues both Circuit City and the police station for all their worth. People who abuse consumers and citizens merely because of their ignorance of their rights is one of the main reasons I began this website.

Oh, and in case you don't see the problem, check out this nicely put comment from Slashdot.org:

That bag contained his private property that he had just purchased. He gave them money for it, it's his, not theirs.

Should he be able to inspect their cash registers after his purchase? After all, they contain money that was his just moments before.

Would you feel differently about the privacy implications if he were leaving Wal*Mart and had just filled his prescription for an STD, or to prevent his frequent diarrhea? Pharmacists are licensed professionals, trained on the privacy aspects of their profession. You're saying that I should have to expose my medical condition to any minimum-wage flunkie who gets curious?

Go Michael, go!

Update 9/5/2007

He'll continue to update his blog with information on the case. Today's entry included this quote:

You don’t have to stand in front of a tank or refuse to move to the back of the bus to make a difference in the world.

Well said.

Update 9/20/2007

He WON! Sort of.

RFID

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The people over at CASPIAN have warned about how companies are trying hard to get RFID tags into all their products without people knowing. Well, now they will. The anti-theft tags that nearly every product currently has will be combined with RFID technology so that nearly every item you walk out of the store with will also transmit a unique identifying number to any reader nearby. Theives, marketers and big brother are salivating.

You don't believe that companies are desperately interested in what you do every waking moment? Then you haven't been paying attention.