All Your Accounts Are Belong To Us

Would you give your account ID, password, account numbers, email address, home address, and all your other sensitive personal information to random strangers? No? Are you sure? Scripts embedded in a web page or app allow the script provider to record every keystroke and every mouse movement you make on the page.

So why are so many of the scripts on account management pages hosted by 3rd parties?

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Today for the first time, a web site I visited directed me to  The site is supposed to be a service for webmasters who need an easy and accurate way to tell site visitors how to enable Javascript in the browser.  Though at first glance that may seem like a great idea and a useful service, it is just the opposite.

This is bad on so many levels.

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Vendor entitlement run amok

My main issue with vendors turning us into instrumented data sources isn’t the data so much as the lack of consent. My Fitbit knows a lot about me but it’s an add-on that I self-selected and it provides value to me. The tracking in my browser is not something I can easily avoid since the browser is now an integral part of my life. Between those extremes there are lots of IoT devices that you can currently choose a private version but where that choice is rapidly disappearing. You can still buy a dumb light switch but not a dumb car, for example. Your shiny new GT phones home.

Among the vendors who seem to feel an entitlement to our data is Microsoft, whose Windows 10 is basically a box of spyware disguised as a user-productivity-gaming-and-cat-video-watching platform. I’ve already written about the issues there, how to mitigate them, and the disheartening number of those “features” that can’t be disabled. Yet as bad as all that is, this latest revelation still managed to surprise me across several metrics: the lack of consent, the extent of the invasion, the degree of exposure, the fact that it’s already been exploited to infect user devices, the fact that the entity who exploited it is a “legitimate” vendor, and the fact that said “legitimate” vendor egregiously exposed the exploit to the Internet. [Read more…]

The nightmare of easy and simple

The instrumented waste bin I predicted at the San Francisco Personal Data meetup a couple years back is now a thing.  While researching GeniCan I naturally had to go read their privacy policy.  It was there that I stumbled onto a service that lets you generate a privacy policy from a workflow.  You fill in some data and select from several options, it generates a custom policy from an inventory of templates that it fills in and assembles.  It can make policies for your web site, Facebook app or mobile app. Easy. Simple. Free.

Sounds awesome, right?

You were waiting for the “but”?

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Better surveys = better signal

I’ve spilled many bits in this blog about the difference between vendor-driven creepy malvertising ad-tech versus consumer-driven intentcasting and Vendor Relationship management.  The vendor-driven model is the one where you are surveilled from all sides and the data compiled, analyzed, sliced, diced, massaged, correlated and enhanced until the vendor has a good idea to which things you will respond viscerally and then attempt to manipulate you with them.  This model is based on exploitation of human biases and vigilance fatigue. Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) on the other hand is about the consumer broadcasting intent and preferences to a market that can respond accordingly.  This model is based on fulfillment of the consumer’s self-directed interests and desires.

Somewhere in the middle are consumer surveys: direct customer input, wholly vendor driven.  Or at least many people, vendors and customers alike, think these are somewhere in the middle.  Me?  I’m a sucker for surveys since they are about as close to VRM as it gets most of the time these days.  I fill them out in bulk in hopes of detecting some whiff of VRM in one of them, and now and then I’m rewarded for my effort.  But only once in a blue moon.  Sadly, virtually all surveys I’ve seen fail to rise to a level that might qualify as anything close to VRM and most are just plain clueless.

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Forget back doors, the NSA wants to mandate a front door

In their never-ending quest to eavesdrop on you, the NSA now wants to mandate that all encrypted communications must allow them access.  As Joel Hruska explains in an article in Extreme Tech, there are many reasons why this will not work.  The two big ones are that it isn’t possible to guarantee only authorized government agents will use the access, and because we currently have no effective means of oversight and accountability.

Dean Landsman recently posed the question “how does one go about preventing/protecting or just enabling security against such intrusion?”  The only answer is to do so in the legislature and in the various international bodies.  If the NSA proposals and others of its ilk become law, products like Blackphone and Qredo will become illegal.  However, this will not stop criminals from using crypto that the government cannot break and which is readily available.  It is true in the most literal sense that when unbreakable crypto is outlawed, only outlaws will have unbreakable crypto.

Considering the triviality of obtaining unbreakable crypto, only law-abiding citizens will use the NSA-accessbile stuff.  Combine that with the power imbalance inherent in such a scheme and the inevitable conclusion is this:

Of all possible uses to which such a law can be put, the only ones we can predict with 100% confidence to be implemented are those that abuse the privacy of law-abiding citizens.

The corollary to this is that the higher value a criminal target, the more likely they are to use readily available unbreakable crypto.  That means the people the government most wants to catch are those least likely to be vulnerable to eavesdropping if the proposed legislation is enacted.  Such a law would be unfit for its stated purpose.  It would be broken at birth, defective by design.

There are a few possible technological controls that can be imposed.  For example, when using blinded tokens it is possible to design them in such a way that they can be un-blinded but doing so is detectable.  It is doubtful any government would agree to using that technology though, since their investigation would revealed immediately upon the unblinding of the token.

However, even if enforceable accountability were implemented as a compromise, the government’s strategy could be to simply unblind everything.  Sort of a mass Denial-of-Privacy attack.  Or perhaps a Denial-of-Privacy-Enhancement (DOPE) attack if you want the acronym to accurately describe the people who would do such a thing.

This also illustrates one of the primary weapons brought to bear against personal liberty around the world: fatigue.  All that is necessary to pass such laws is to keep submitting them to the legislature.  The people impacted will object the first time.  A few less of them the second time.  When it comes down to just the die-hard activists, the legislature can be confident they are one bill away from victory.

Thomas Jefferson once said “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”  That was before digital communications were invented.  Can we perhaps try to refresh the tree of liberty with a call or FAX to our representative before we go off and start killing people?

Surprising security issue at Host Gator


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Roadie further blurs the lines between atoms and bits


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The Newtrain Manifesto

Next month Deborah Schultz will be presenting a keynote called Smart Data: The Struggle to Enhance Customer Experience in a Digital World at the Direct Marketing Association’s upcoming Marketing Analytics Conference.  In preparation she bounced the topic off of the VRM mailing list asking how the crowd there would challenge this audience.  Naturally, I had a few ideas.

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Listening wasn’t bad enough?






Because they manufactured the display.















