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Computer Users
This article is a copyrighted work of PestPatrol.
Introduction
Computer users all over the world have consistently indicated that
privacy is one of the key elements in their willingness or reluctance to
using information technology . Collecting information about users has
become a lucrative business, with some companies funding their
activities primarily through the sale of marketing data or lists of
potential customers with details that allow targeted contacts.
Unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam, has become a daily annoyance for
millions of e-mail users. Telemarketing phone calls generate enormous
resistance, especially when unscrupulous businesspeople call your home
during the dinner hour or refuse to take victims off their calling
lists. Grocery store loyalty cards not only provide discounts, they also
track individual purchases; in some stores, customers' information
allows specialized, targeted coupons to be printed at the cash register
so that a competitor's product can be purchased at a discount on the
next shopping trip.
On the interpersonal level, some people use Web-based services to
look into the personal background of individuals on the Internet;
employers use search engines and archives to read public postings by
potential employees; and criminals sift through personal details to
construct forged identities in the furtherance of identity theft. All
these activities are possible without the use of computers, but they are
greatly facilitated by the availability of large-scale databases online
and of efficient search engines for collating data from different
sources. Research that might have taken months of legwork, perhaps
requiring personal visits to government offices to copy data laboriously
by hand, can now be completed in minutes. As a result, finding out about
people's lives has changed from one-by-one investigation into massive
collation of data about millions of people at a time.
Personal computers have provided fertile ground for data collection
about individuals. Many Web sites store information about individual
users' browsing patterns in files called cookies, which reside on the
user's hard disk. Cookies allow personalized views of a Web site; for
example, an online bookstore can keep track of all the books that a user
has searched for or requested additional information on. This
information then allows the bookstore software to suggest additional
titles that might interest that specific user. On a less friendly note,
some users of particular software programs have been surprised to
discover that their programs are placing unauthorized calls to data
collection sites on the Internet to upload information about their
systems or system usage.
All of these phenomena raise issues of privacy in the age of
cyberspace. In this short paper, ordinary, non-technical users can get a
sense of the fundamental issues that face all of us as we try to strike
a balance between efficient commerce and our concerns about personal
privacy.
Concepts of Privacy
Privacy can be thought of as the power to hide parts of the truth
about oneself, or sometimes the power to control the use of truths about
one that other people know. For example, many people would consider that
the books they read or what they say in private to each other ought to
remain private. In addition, the concept of informational privacy covers
truths they may have revealed to others for specific purposes but that
ought nonetheless to be controlled. Medical records, for instance, would
seem to be semi-private under this view; a patient could reasonably
approve having her gynecological data shared with doctors and nurses
without wanting the details to be published in a newspaper or on the
Web. Simson Garfinkel eloquently addresses the fluidity of privacy as
follows: "Privacy isn’t just about hiding things. It’s about
self-possession, autonomy, and integrity . . . . It’s the right of
people to control what details about their lives stay inside their own
houses and what leaks to the outside."
In United States legal theory, a statement by Justice Louis Brandeis
sums up the American attitude towards privacy:
"The makers of our Constitution . . . Sought to protect Americans
in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations.
They conferred as against the Government, the right to be let
alone—the most comprehensive of the rights of man and the right most
valued by civilized men."
Under common law, invasion of privacy can consist of
- Intrusion upon a person’s seclusion in a substantial manner that
would offend a reasonable person, such as pointing telephoto lenses at
a bedroom window;
- Appropriation of a person’s name or likeness – of concern
primarily to celebrities who object to unauthorized use of their name
or image in advertising campaigns;
- Publicity given to someone’s private life such as details of
sexual conduct, medical or psychiatric history; and
- Publicity placing a person in a false light, such as insinuating
that individuals support a particular political view when they don’t.
One of the best definitions is as follows:
"Privacy:
- The right of an entity (normally a person), acting in its own
behalf, to determine the degree to which it will interact with its
environment, including the degree to which the entity is willing to
share information about itself with others . . . .
- The right of individuals to control or influence what
information related to them may be collected and stored and by whom
and to whom that information may be disclosed . . . . ."
Another key concept is that "There are two kinds of truth that the
law might try to protect:
- Truths about you that you have revealed to the public, either by
giving some information over to someone else, or by being observed in
public; or
- Truths about you that you have kept private."
Prof. Lawrence Lessig analyzes conceptions of privacy into three
major concerns: minimizing intrusion, maintaining human dignity and
constraining the power of the state (what he calls the substantive
conception).
Cryptographer and security theorist Bruce Schneier makes an
interesting point about the fundamental types of privacy violations:
"There are two types of privacy violations—targeted attacks and data
harvesting—and they are fundamentally different. In a targeted attack,
an attacker wants to know everything about Alice. If ‘Alice’ is a
person, it’s called stalking. If ‘Alice’ is a company, it’s called
industrial espionage. If ‘Alice’ is a government, it’s called national
intelligence or spying . . . ." In contrast, writes Schneier, data
harvesting uses inference to sift through different lists of data about
large numbers of data subjects and allows the attacker to generate a
list of people who fit specific selection criteria.
The US Constitution does not specifically mention privacy, but the
Fourth Amendment is usually applied when discussing government intrusion
on people’s lives. The Amendment specifically forbids unreasonable
search and seizure by government and law enforcement agents.
The distinction between government intrusion and intrusion by private
commerce is important, because in the US, there are fewer privacy
restrictions on private industry than on government. For example, buying
a book, ordering a video, seeing a movie in a theater and eating in a
restaurant have traditionally been seen as public activities; US law has
said little about limiting observations of these kinds. Certainly
financial information about consumers has been widely shared among
lending institutions (including such unexpected entities as auto
dealerships and appliance stores) and among credit agencies. The most
important difference between government and private intrusions is that
consumers can (often unknowingly) sign away their privacy rights by
agreeing to contracts. End-user license agreements often contain
language that specifically reduces a member’s or a user’s privacy
rights.
In contrast, the European Union has promulgated much more stringent
regulations – primarily the Data Protection Directive – on the sharing
of private information – to the point of causing friction with US-based
firms doing business in Europe . Until 1998, there were serious
limitations to how European countries could transfer personal data to
firms doing business in the USA; however, the "Safe Harbor" agreement
provided a framework that gave credibility to the non-governmental,
self-regulatory strategies favored in the US .
The US government has also progressed in national legislation to
protect privacy. The two most important measures are the Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) that governs
privacy of medical records and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley (GLB) Act that
protects financial records about individuals.
In daily life, many people also have concerns about their privacy at
work . In general, in the USA, the reasonable expectation of privacy
governs to what extent employers may monitor electronic communications
except personal phone calls. Because organizations own or control their
e-mail, voice-mail and Internet-access systems, managers do have the
right to monitor or intercept communications made via those media.
However, it is generally accepted that employees be allowed to make
personal phone calls from work; indeed, according to the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) , any manager monitoring a live phone
call is supposed to stop listening as soon as it is clear that the call
is a personal one. All of this monitoring supposes that employees are
aware of the likelihood of monitoring and that monitoring is carried out
in a fair, unbiased way that cannot be construed as harassment or
persecution of individual employees. Normally, employees must sign
waivers (in many places every year) stating that they understand that
the communications channels provided by their employer are the property
of and under the control of the employer and may be monitored or
intercepted at any time. A good rule of thumb is that no one should be
doing anything on employer-supplied equipment that they would be
embarrassed to discuss with their manager. Certainly writing extensive
personal e-mail messages at work or spending hours on the Web in
searches that are unrelated to one’s job will result in questions about
an employee’s level of productivity.
In Europe, in contrast to the US situation, all personal
communications by employees, including telephone, e-mail and via the
Internet, are considered private and therefore subject to the Data
Protection Directive restrictions .
Technological Threats
Office software
Modern computer technology offers many avenues for violating users’
privacy. For example, few users realize that if they allow Microsoft
Office products to use "fast saves," they silently keep a full record of
all the changes that they have made in a document. The same principle
applies to changes made with "track changes" enabled. When such
documents are sent to others, much more information may be revealed than
expected; examples include comments from editors, reconsidered phrases,
and even factual information that was supposed to be suppressed. Even
the seemingly inoffensive Properties sheet may carry more freight than a
user wants; many documents show the names of previous employers, details
of managers' names and positions, and even comments that should not be
made public. Before sending any MS-Office products to anyone else, all
users should check to see that
- The properties sheet has no more information that they wish to
reveal;
- They have unchecked "fast save" in the TOOLS | OPTIONS | SAVE
menu;
- They have turned off TRACK CHANGES by using the TOOLS | TRACK
CHANGES | ACCEPT OR REJECT CHANGES menu and converting all changes
into decisions on the final copy to be released.
Malware and spyware
Malicious software such as viruses (programs that reproduce by
inserting themselves into other programs) and worms (self-reproducing
programs that propagate through networks) sometimes carry victims’
documents with them. Recent examples of such privacy-busting malware
include the Sircam worm and the Nimda virus-worm .
Spyware is software that covertly transfers information about an
unsuspecting user to a corporate site where the information can be
collated and used for marketing or as material to be sold for a profit.
Spyware often enters a system through freeware or shareware, especially
those that are ad-supported . Some browser plug-ins that offer new
functions may contain spyware. Even HTML-enabled e-mail sometimes
contains tiny one-pixel graphics images (Web bugs) that reside on
undocumented Web sites; reading such e-mail causes a hit on the data
collection site, thus confirming that the message has been opened and
allowing an advertiser to be charged for the potential exposure to
another victim of covert monitoring .
Many spyware products allow uncontrolled downloading of arbitrary
code, thus threatening the integrity of the operating system; for
example, the update-dll.exe file has already been found in three
different versions in the wild, some of which may be transformed to
download unauthorized code. This file is installed by the Aureate /
Radiate toolkit, which is used in programs that currently reside on over
30 million computers today.
Spyware programs have also been demonstrated to cause browser and
operating system crashes. For example, one of the files associated with
the Aureate/Radiate toolkit is advert.dll, which is routinely removed by
technical support personnel to stop repeated system crashes.
One way of discovering that a computer is infested with spyware is to
set a personal firewall to alert the user whenever a new request for an
outbound connection is made. Tools such as BlackIce , Norton Personal
Firewall , and ZoneAlarm provide such functions. In addition, a
spyware-blocking tool called Silencer can block all messages from being
returned to spyware "mother ships." Steve Gibson, a highly-respected
programmer, makes a free utility called LeakTest that checks your
firewall or spyware-blocker to be sure that unauthorized messages are in
fact being blocked.
Many spyware programs resist uninstallation; even after going through
the uninstall routines, functional programs may persist and continue to
communicate with their host systems (this is known as "phoning home" in
a reference to the movie "E.T."). It can be frustrating and
time-consuming to remove all vestiges of unwanted spyware, and most
users lack the technical ability to ferret through the system registry
and file system looking for unauthorized entries.
Another category of threats to privacy is the remote-administration
trojan, sometimes called RAT. These tools masquerade as legitimate
programs for administrators to use when providing technical support;
however, products such as BackOrifice , NetBus , and SubSeven are trojan
horses which include undocumented functions that allow unauthorized
individuals to gain complete control over the compromised systems.
Infested systems can show bizarre behavior, such as repeated opening and
closing of the CD-ROM tray, disabled keyboards, and pop-up messages.
Worse still, the remote attackers can extract all kinds of information,
including screen snapshots, lists of files, copies of private files, and
even keyboard logs showing the keys pressed while entering passwords.
Any online activity, including instant messaging, is vulnerable to
invasion by these stealthy invaders.
A number of products are available to address the removal of some or
all of these types of malware. Aureate/Radiate DLL Remover and AdAware
from Lavasoft specifically address certain types of spyware; PestPatrol
, from the company that commissioned this paper, addresses the removal
of trojans, hacker tools and denial-of-service attack agents in addition
to spyware and adware.
Ten Tips for Increasing Online Privacy
Check out these practical tips to improve your privacy protection
while you're online.
- Look for privacy policies on web sites:
Web sites can collect a lot of information about your visit - what
computer you use, what type of hardware and software you have, what
web sites you have visited. Web sites that ask you to provide even a
small amount of personal information can tie the data you provide to
your browsing habits. When you go to a web site that has no privacy
policy, write and tell the company that you are a user of their site,
your privacy is important to you and you would like to see them post a
policy. An increasing number of web sites has begun to provide privacy
policies that detail the sites' information practices. Look for these
policies and read them carefully. While privacy statements are not the
only answer to online privacy risks, the effort should be encouraged
and commended.
- Use a separate account for your personal e-mail:
Often, online users do not realize that e-mail sent from their work
accounts is likely to be an open book to their employers. Even if you
send an e-mail from your home, a copy is often stored on your
employer's main computer server. Your boss has a legal right to read
any and all correspondence in this account or on your work computer at
any time. Getting a separate account for home allows you to check your
personal messages without using your workplace e-mail server.
- Teach your kids that giving out personal information online
means giving it to strangers:
Teach your children that they need your permission before they can
give out their name, address or other information about themselves or
the family. Several years ago, a number of web sites encouraged
children to give information about themselves or their family; some
enticed kids with games and free gifts. In 1998, a law was passed
requiring companies to gain parental consent before collecting
personal information from children under 13 years old. If you are
concerned about a web site collecting information from children
without consent, you should communicate your concern to the Federal
Trade Commission at
kidsprivacy@ftc.gov.
- Clear your browser cache after browsing:
After you browse the web, copies of all accessed pages and images are
saved in your computer's memory. While these copies make subsequent
visits to the same sites faster, the browsing record has grave
implications for personal privacy, particularly if you share a
computer or browse at work. You can delete most of your online trail
by simply going to the "Preferences" folder in your browser and
clicking on the "Empty Cache" button. Sometimes this option is in the
"Advanced" menu of the browser preferences. In Internet Explorer, go
to "Internet Options" from the "Tools" menu and click on "Clear
History".
- Make sure that online forms are secure:
Online forms may be digitally transported in ways that leave them
vulnerable to undesired access. Alternatively, online forms may be
encrypted so that only the intended recipients can readily translate
the information. Ensuring that your information is stored and
transferred in secure ways is one of the keys to protecting your
privacy online. Fortunately, browser companies have realized the
importance of data security; newer browsers are designed to indicate
whether the accessed page allows encrypted transfers. The commonly
used graphics are a key, which is broken if the page is insecure, and
a lock—locked is secure and unlocked is not secure. The graphic
appears in the corner of the browser screen; clicking on the lock or
the key will inform you of additional security information about the
page. You should not input sensitive personal information about
yourself (such as financial or medical data) on web pages that are not
secure.
- Reject unnecessary cookies:
Cookies enable web sites to store information about your visit on your
own hard drive. Cookies inform site operators if you have visited the
site and, if you have obtained a username and password, cookies
remember that information for you. Many of the "personalized" search
engines use cookies to deliver news topics that users select; sites
often use these same preferences to target advertisements. Cookies can
also be used to track you online and enable a creation of a profile
without you realizing it. You can search your hard drive for a file
with the word "cookie" in it (e.g., cookies.txt or MagicCookie) to
view the cookies that have been attached to your computer. Newer
browsers allow you to recognize sites that send you cookies and reject
them outright by accessing the "Advanced" screen of the "Preferences"
menu. In Internet Explorer, delete cookies by clicking on the "Delete
Files" button in the "General" icon of "Tools" "Internet Options"
menu.
- Use anonymous remailers:
Anonymity is essential to privacy and free speech. It protects whistle
blowers and writers of controversial material; most simply, it may
enable one to publish without a forwarding address. The e-mail
technology creates problems for the right to anonymous communication
since the sender of a message can be traced back through digital
paths. Created to address privacy risks and concerns, "anonymous
remailers" presently allow you to send anonymous e-mail messages. One
very good remailer was created as a joint project of the George Mason
Society and the Global Internet Liberty Campaign and is available on
the web at
http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer.html.
- Use encryption to keep your e-mail private:
E-mail is not as secure as many believe. E-mail can be easily rerouted
and read by unintended third parties; messages are often saved for
indefinite periods of time. Presently, there exist technologies that
allow you to encrypt your messages in order to protect their privacy.
Some e-mail programs (e.g., Internet Explorer Outlook and Netscape
Messenger) have encryption. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), popular
encryption software, is free for non-commercial use. Read more on PGP
and download the encryption software at
http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html.
- Use anonymizers while browsing:
From the moment you type in a web address, a log is kept with
information about your visit. Every day, most of us walk down the
street without being recognized or tracked. While anonymity is often
taken for granted in the physical world, such luxury is not available
online. Tools that strip out user information, thus preserving
anonymity, have been created; a few are readily available on the net.
Visit http://www.freedom.net and
http://www.anonymizer.com.
- Opt-out of third party information sharing:
Many online companies provide you with the option to get off (or
"opt-out" of) the lists that share your information. Some companies
enable users to easily opt out—users are often able to do so online. A
number of companies go a step further and ask your permission (opt-in)
before sharing personal information that they have collected. Often,
however, companies make opting out difficult or virtually impossible:
addresses are buried, one cannot opt-out online, etc. Don't be afraid
to contact the sending company if you want to be removed.
Summary
There are many threats to privacy in this age of increasing
connectivity. You can prevent compromise by criminals and by
privacy-invading pest infestations by following these simple rules:
- Read the fine print before installing any software, and especially
adware that is supported by channeling ads to your computer;
- Install and configure a personal firewall on your computer to
identify and block unauthorized outbound connections as well as
unauthorized inbound connections;
- Always run an antivirus program that updates itself automatically
to counter new threats;
- Scan your system regularly with a tool like PestPatrol, which
identifies and removes not only spyware but also many thousands of
other pests that can hurt your computer and your privacy.
About PestPatrol
PestPatrol, Inc. is a Carlisle, PA based developer of anti-hacker
tools founded in May 2000 by a team of security software professionals
to counter the growing threat of malicious non-viral software. The
company's founders, Robert C Bales and Dr David Stang, were the original
founders of the National Computer Security Association (NCSA), later the
ICSA and now known as TruSecure Corporation. The company's flagship
product, PestPatrol™, detects and removes hacker, remote administration
and distributed denial-of-service attack creation tools, trojans,
spyware and adware. Further details about the company and a free
evaluation version of the software may be downloaded at
http://www.pestpatrol.com/downloads/eval/download.asp.
