There are so many questions I want to ask such as why Google stores data for so long (which they've avoided answering before) and why the FTC doesn't promote credit freezes (which they've avoided answering before).

In the meantime, there's talk about the different types of data collection each group does and the standard rigamarole about customizing and targeting advertisements as if that's helpful to the end user. Granted having ads that are more appropriate are more useful than less, but I see that as the same as having a neighbor down the street that you hardly know bring you a box of your favorite beef jerky. It's nice, but damned creepy when someone knows that much about you when you don't know who they are, what their intentions are, and how much else they know about you.

I stood up to lecture the panel on the fact that personalized ads aren't necessary for small sites to exist if they use the product recommendation method versus random ad policy like me, opt-out is an unfair business practice since it requires that people become very knowledgeable about ads and how to stop them which is near impossible for regular people, and opt-in is not only necessary, it's easy.

I doubt the information I shared will have any positive effect on the industry, but it was still worth a try.

In a direct slap across the face to the barely legal Freecreditreport.com, the FTC has released a spoof video of the pirate restaurant ad to highlight that there's only ONE place to get free credit reports and the rest are all pay services in disguise.

The original ad

The FTC version

Beware of the others,

There's always a catch,

They claim to be free,

But there are strings attached,

Brilliant!

It's so very rare that regulatory agencies actually get it right! Send this link to everyone you know and make sure they see it too.

Legal experts and environmental advocates say the practice of "sanitizing," or blacking out, this information not only strips vital information from the public, it violates the agency's own law.

Thus the EPA is broken. Is there any government agency that's actually doing its job and doing it well?

Check it out.

(H/T to Schneier's Blog for the link)

Y.R. Tap - The reject Cryptokid

But that's not what I'm posting about.

I ran across this interesting comic about the unpopular little-know cryptokid, Y.R. Tap, the NSA domestic spying fly. The fly shows the Cryptokids what can happen when civil liberties are violated.

Buy a ticket in some innocent person's name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.

His article on why the no-fly-list and photo ID checks are useless against terrorists here.

Well gosh, how could they ever have seen that coming?

Anyway, Schneier covers the story and links to the TSA's response as well as taking a moment to denounce the program again along with most of what the TSA is doing for airport security. Since I've met the privacy officer for the TSA and know he knows what he's doing, the only reason I can come up with for this is that they're not listening to him when he's telling them not to put this kind of data on laptops unencrypted.