"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

I've seen several people frantically posting the latest viral goofiness on Facebook, and instead of stamping on it every single place, I'm just going to post here, once.

People are getting wound up and frantic about the fact that a website, spokeo.com, is selling personal data. The viral message tells everyone to HURRY, HURRY, go to the Spokeo website and opt out of their evul sellin' yur infoz plan!

Now, it's great that Spokeo has given people an opt-out option (assuming that it actually works--has anyone verified that it does?)

But the issue is not that Spokeo is selling this data. It's that YOU are giving it to them! All the data they have is available to them for free on the Internet or is estimated by them based on other available data.

If you want people to stop reselling information *you* provide to the world, publicly, for free--STOP PROVIDING IT!

But, I would suggest, a more rational response would be to STOP FREAKING OUT. Yes, data aggregators exist. Most of us on the Internet use them all the time--by using services that either give us information they've gained from others (have you *never* looked at goods suggested to you by some variation of "people who bought X also bought Y" really? never? have you never used Yelp or Angie's List or Trip Advisor to check reviews?) or providing us with services that are informed and refined by customer usage data. Horrified that people can see your street address? Really? You don't have a telephone, and you never receive mail, then? Shocked that people know your gender, or your favourite ice cream flavour, or where you went to university? Then why did you fill out that quiz that told anyone who uses it those things?

If you seriously want to take your personal info out of the hands of resellers, don't worry about Spokeo; there are dozens, probably hundreds more companies just like it; are you going to go to all their websites? Act at the source--stop posting information you don't want the world to know on the single greatest worldwide communication system in the history of humanity. (As for the stuff you've already posted, well, too late. :-) Data on the Internet is like plastic shopping bags--it sticks around forever.)

But maybe, just maybe, re-examine your mindless terror at people knowing basic information about you. Because if you really want to be invisible, you need to do much, much more than nuke your Facebook or Blogger account. You have to stop earning money, paying taxes, owning property, driving a car, participating in political and civic and professional organizations... and much more. All of those actions generate publicly available data about you. Information that anyone can access.

Think about why you think this is such a terrifying thing.

Then take a deep, deep breath and chill the heck out.

Ganked from reabhecc

An interesting comparison of Israeli airport security with North America's

Doesn't get into useful-to-terrorist details, just looks at the differences in underlying concepts, which demonstrate why Israeli security doesn't have the huge backups and massive delays that US & Canadian security have. ( Read more... )

White House staffers ignore basic security procedures, with no repercussions

Security practices at the White House are dangerously inadequate say current and former employees of the security office there, according to a letter sent today from the House Oversight Committee to former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, asking that he cooperate with the committee's investigation into the alleged security lapses.

"These security officials described a systemic breakdown in security procedures at the White House," wrote the chairman of the committee, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Among the lapses cited by the security officers, who spoke to the committee anonymously, are multiple instances of breaches being reported to the security office that were ignored and never investigated. Several of those instances allegedly involved the mishandling of SCI (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information), which is the highest level of classified information.

In one instance, a White House official reportedly left SCI material behind in a hotel room during a foreign trip with the president. The CIA did recover the highly classified material, but the security office did not investigate the incident or discipline the individual, according a security officer's account in the letter.( Read more... )