privacy

One of the objectives of the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference is the creation of a Silicon Valley Standard (SVS). This is a principled statement incorporating the issues discussed at the 2011 Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference. The document includes 15 principles based on the 15 workshop topics covered at the conference.

The document is designed to complement other existing frameworks and uses the international human rights framework as its foundation. These principles served as a useful basis for discussion during the panels and represent a standard, which we hope the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector will use after the conference.

You may have heard that Facebook turned on a new feature recently without notifying users - automatic facial recognition. When uploading photos to Facebook, your contacts will now be prompted automatically to tag you in the photos. This is done using a "picture fingerprint" (as the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls it). You may like this - but it is possible to turn it off if you don't like it or are concerned about your security... as I think many activists or civil society practitioners working in Africa should be.

Password security is a recurring theme for Kabissa members. We just had a reminder this week how important it is to have uncrackable passwords. Below is a great primer that I suggest you follow right away to tighten up your own passwords, especially for email, facebook, kabissa and other mission critical online tools you use for your work in Africa. As usual, please reply with your own tips/suggestions/questions.

I just read the Guardian Tech post Facebook set to launch 'Gmail killer' email system, excerpted below, about a new @facebook.com email service apparently slated to launch tomorrow. I think it's important for people working in African civil society to reflect carefully about what this means about how we all will be using Facebook and the Internet for work and play.

I like Facebook, but it is not a central tool for me or for Kabissa, and I use it despite serious concerns I have had all along about privacy on the service. I've blogged about my concerns about privacy and security issues on Facebook here and here, which have not yet really been addressed to my satisfaction. I am seriously concerned for activists who may be put in danger through unwittingly sharing their personal data and activities on Facebook. This feeling was not helped today when I also read a TechCrunch post How To Mass Export All Of Your Facebook Friends’ Private Email Addresses - which Facebook does not actually allow you to do but which apparently can be done easily using Yahoo email.  

What do you think? Is it a good thing that Facebook is positioning itself to be the only place that we all go to when we get online to get our work done as well as stay connected with friends and colleagues? 

As a tech enthusiast, one of the things I like about Google mail is the ongoing tweaking and innovating with the service. Sometimes changes are annoying at first (the user interface was "streamlined" a few weeks ago and I didn't like it), sometimes changes don't help that much (Google Buzz certainly did not revolutionize the way I connect and engage with my friends and associates) but sometimes the improvements are hugely beneficial. Since Priority Inbox was announced last week I have been waiting eagerly for it to be activated in my accounts so I can try it out and share my learnings with the Kabissa community. New services tend to be rolled out slowly as Google looks for and irons out bugs, and it took a week this time for Priority Inbox to finallyarrive in my Kabissa mailboxes (though not yet in my gmail.com mailbox). 

At first glance I like Priority Inbox very much - it adds a new label above the Inbox which presents your incoming email in three categories: important and unread, starred, and everything else. It uses the same automatic algorithms it uses for spam filtering to decide what is important ("based on what you read") and lets you train it by indicating whether it was right or not. Time will tell how well it actually works, and part of the idea is that it will in fact get better with time as it "learns" your priorities.

I think Priority Inbox is a great idea and will be very useful, especially for those in Africa who struggle to make maximum use of the limited time they have in front of Internet connected computers to get their work done. On the other hand, as usual this raises questions about Google and privacy, and how much we can afford to allow corporations like Google to know so much about what we are corresponding about and with whom. For African activists and journalists, keeping certain activities and relationships secret can be a matter of life and death. Perhaps they should not be using gmail. I've already talked about the risks of Facebook for activists - now do we also have to worry about our email? What are the alternatives? 

What do you think?

Below is a copy of the email I received in my inbox explaining the new service and linking to an introductory video with quite the peppy sound track. 

I was recently asked to contribute my thoughts on how election monitors using simple mobile phones could improve their safety and security when working in hostile environments. More specifically, the goal was to find techniques by which their use of SMS messaging to report back to a centralized service or team could be done in a more secure, private manner, that would make it more difficult for an adversary working against them to stop, block or track. All of this must be done without software or special hardware, instead just relying on easily teachable techniques.

Here’s the collection of tips and ideas I came up with on short notice. It is by no means complete, but I felt it would be useful to publish these to a wider audience here on my blog. Finally, before you say “well couldn’t criminals and terrorists use these techniques too?”, I will refer you to an excellent Abuse FAQ page from the Tor Project which covers this very topic (“Criminals can already do bad things. Since they’re willing to break laws, they already have lots of options available that provide better privacy than Tor provides”).

Now, on to the topic at hand…

Do you use gmail? If so, be aware that it exposes you to a potentially serious privacy flaw - if you work in human rights or otherwise don't want to share who you email with to the public, you need to read this post for an explanation.

The following article from LifeHacker.com is targeted to travelers, not African activists or organizations, but still contains a wealth of essential tips for everyone working in countries "where privacy isn't respected". This includes tactics as well as specific references to tools that we should all be using. If you are not thinking about privacy yet, now is a good time to tackle it. 

Yesterday Facebook enacted a new set of privacy rules, the purpose of which is to expand the information which all users share, making it “easier for you to find and connect with the people you’re looking for.”  However, according to a great analysis by the  Electronic Frontier Foundation:<

I have been spending more time on Facebook recently. Overall it's been a very positive experience and I have to say that Facebook is becoming increasingly useful for networking, keeping in touch and joining forces with likeminded people and organizations for fundraising or awareness building. However, I had an odd experience this morning that raised alarm bells for me.