word is going around that the RIAA asked social music service Last.fm for data about its user’s listening habits to find people with unreleased tracks on their computers. And Last.fm, which is owned by CBS, actually handed the data over to the RIAA.
via Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?.
[ I think when I started using last.fm again recently, I asked someone if it wasn't just a very convenient way of giving the MAFIAA a nice index to sue users based on, and the idea was dismissed as insane 
]
Russ comments:
Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we’d never personally identify our users to a third party – that goes against everything we stand for. [1]
Update 2009-02-23: RIAA has denied this as well. Which is why I’m seriously considering the chance that such a leak occurred… 
newspicks newspicks, privacy
Not-so-surprising news from UK:
Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database.
Internet black boxes to record every email and website visit – Telegraph
newspicks privacy, runforthehills
Nokia Sports Tracker is a nifty service (and S60 application) that allows you to store your walking/running/cycling/etc trip data in a file, and then upload it to the service. This file will contain the GPS coordinates you were on during your trip, allowing generation of nice graphs of average speed at the different parts of the trip, a map of the trip and so on. The data can also be exported and then imported to Google Earth of Google Maps for example. You can also upload pictures you took on the trip, and you’ll be able to see what position on the map you took them at.
It all seems free (for now) and nice, but a closer look at the Terms of Service does reveal something unpleasant.
Read more…
Uncategorized cycling, legal, nokia, privacy
Rick Falkvinge and Peter Sunde (brokep of the TPB fame) have both blogged about the FRA deal:
Falkvinge has older, rather lengthy, posts about the whole deal here:
politics politics, privacy
Swedish lawmakers voted late on Wednesday in favour of a controversial bill allowing all emails and phone calls to be monitored in the name of national security.
thelocal.se
Why is this interesting for someone living in Finland? Most of Finland’s outbound traffic (and even some internal) passes through Sweden [1, 2], which means it will be inspected and logged by FRA.
Links:
More articles can be found from Google news and blogsearch.
Update 2008-06-20: The law will take effect on 2009-01-01, but I vaguely remember reading somewhere that FRA has already admitted that they have been (unlawfully) monitoring the traffic, saying that there’s no problem as it will be discarded after 1.5 years (the Wikipedia article has swedish sources).
politics politics, privacy
Google Analytics has been now enabled for both the blog and the wiki.
If you are worried about your privacy on this or other sites that use Google Analytics for usage statistics (a lot of them do), I recommend installing the NoScript extension for Firefox (or using some other means to disable the javascripts in other browsers). With NoScript you can just mark google-analytics.com as untrusted and you’ve successfully opted out from (some of) Google’s evil future plans
site google, privacy, site
I generally dislike the idea of one corporation having access to vast amounts of information, but privacy is something you can sell for a price nowadays – if you have any in the first place. Because of the extensive statistics Google Analytics provides, I started wondering whether I should start using it as well.
Read more…
site google, privacy, site
I thought I’d have a look at Nokia’s Share on Ovi, but then this caught my eye in the Terms of Service:
The license you grant to Nokia is a worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, and distribute the content you provide (including any commentary or electronic files of any type), and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, your content.
Uh-huh. I don’t know if I’m reading this wrong or what, but I think I’ll steer away from Share, at least for now…
Uncategorized legal, nokia, privacy
