Category: Privacy

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Inside my Dangerous Mind

My appearance at the Sydney Opera House Festival of Dangerous Ideas, which I’ve told you about before why aren’t you paying attention? — draws ever closer. It’s a week from today, and as part of the promotional lead-up they’ve posted a look Inside my Dangerous Mind.

It’s in question-and-answer format.

Q: What is a dangerous idea?

A: One where merely expressing it puts the speaker in mortal danger, or in danger of expulsion from society. Examples? Mate, your daughter would look fantastic being sodomised by a goat. Behead all those who insult the Prophet. Pouring the tea before the milk.

Well, I reckon you should read the whole thing.

See you next week? It’s Saturday 29 September at 1pm in The Playhouse at the Sydney Opera House. You can book online.

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Talking data retention on ABC Local Radio

The current parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s national security laws has become a mildly hot media topic this week, so I ended up doing a backgrounder on ABC Local Radio last night with Dom Knight.

I should probably write more about this some time. And I will. But for now, here’s that 18-minute conversation. Including our digression into talking about that fine TV drama The Wire.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (10.3MB)

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, archived here because it isn’t being archived anywhere else.

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And for the trifecta, I’m speaking at ACCAN’s conference

Since I’m blogging about my forthcoming speaking engagements, I should probably also mention that I’m on a panel at ACCAN’s National Conference on 5 to 6 September.

ACCAN is the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, and the panel I’m on is called “Privacy & Security”.

Privacy dilemmas are getting bigger every year as more of our lives and essential information are moving online. This discussion will explore online privacy and security policies. A top tech journalist [that’s me!] will examine whether there is such a thing as privacy in the online world, and a broadband services expert will explain the key privacy and security challenges likely faced in providing medical and other services over broadband.

The other panellists are Nigel Waters from the University of New South Wales’ Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre and Dean Economou from NICTA.

So, privacy and security. That seems to be my gig now…

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I’m speaking at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas

The program for the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2012 is out, and I’m on it.

In particular, I’m on a panel discussion called I Share Therefore I Am on Saturday 29 September from 1pm to 2pm.

Whether we lead our whole life online or just dip our toes into the ‘digital pool’ for news or shopping, information about everything we do is being collected, and analysed. Should we accept that our digital footprint will follow us to the grave, shaping our life along the way? Or should we try to hold on to our privacy — even (or especially) when online? Hear from two people who live online, but have distinctly different points of view about the age of sharing and radical transparency.

The person other than me is Victoria Doidge, director of marketing, communications & customer services at the Sydney Opera House. She’s of the share-it-all view, ‘cos the worst that can happen is you’ll see more relevant advertisements. Or something.

I plan to kick off my part of the discussion by sketching out some alarming scenarios made possible by data mining all the things.

[Update 14 September 2012: Added link to session page on Sydney Opera House website.]

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Two podcasts on Telstra’s web monitoring ultragaffe

A couple weeks ago Telstra was caught monitoring the web browsing done by customers of its Next G mobile network and reporting them to an overseas company, Netsweeper. I’m writing more about this soon, so here’s some background so I can link to it.

Josh Taylor explained the story for ZDNet Australia, I did for Crikey, and of course there were others. In brief, though, Telstra told Netsweeper what URLs were being visited by Next G customers — in theory with any personally-identifiable information removed — so Netsweeper could discover new web content and classify it for the content filtering system they were developing for Telstra.

It’s a bit wrong. Telstra stopped the project quick smart. But some people, including me, reckon the situation is rather more serious.

Geoff Huston, chief scientist of regional internet registry Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), reckons it’s so far outside the law that law enforcement agencies should be getting involved. As a common-carrier telco, Telstra is in a privileged position. It shouldn’t be reporting anything about any aspect of digital communications to third parties, except as strictly required under law, just as it can’t do anything with analog phone calls.

Huston explained his views in a blog post, All Your Packets Belong to Us, and discussed it with me on this week’s Patch Monday podcast, Hands off our packets, it’s the law.

You can hear Telstra’s PR response on Phil Dobbie’s Twisted Wire podcast, Is your phone watching you?

(Neither of those podcasts are yet appearing in iTunes or other podcast application feeds. On Monday ZDNet Australia was merged into a new global content management system and the podcast feeds broke. I know the CBS Interactive technicians know it’s a problem, but I don’t have an ETA on when it might be fixed yet.)

On Tuesday, Whirlpool had what purported to be an internal Telstra memo from chief executive David Thodey, who seemed to agree that they’d very much crossed the line.

That’s why I want to remind everyone that privacy is not an aspiration at Telstra — it is an essential requirement and our license to operate.

Privacy at Telstra is everyone’s responsibility. We have to do better.

Now there’s some complicated issues in all this. I’ll be exploring them in the coming week. Meanwhile, do listen to those two podcasts and have a bit of a think.

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Talking about the “Dark Web” on ABC News 24

This morning I was interviewed by ABC News 24 about the “Dark Web”, a term Fairfax news outlets used earlier this week in a story headlined The new underbelly. Since I was at the event in Sydney that triggered the writing of that story, I was happy to tone down some of the hype-scare.

By the “Dark Web” they meant things like Silk Road, a marketplace for all manner of illegality, and the Tor anonymity network that allows Silk Road to hide… somewhere.

I’ll update this post later today to include links to the other things I discussed with presenter Andrew Geoghegan.

If the embedded video doesn’t work for you, you can watch it over on YouTube.

This is a rough copy of the video for now. I’ll upload a better version as soon as it becomes available, though that’ll still have me staring mindlessly into the distance as I’m being introduced. Sigh. The footage is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.