security/privacy - Re: Check out my profile on LinkedIn

(The W3C has a forum called public-privacy which is more
appropriate for these types of discussions. I invite people
interested in these issues to join it ).

On 15 Jun 2014, at 23:50, office@turnguard.com wrote:

> henry, did you actually send these mails, are you using the same
> pass for linkedin, twitter and g+?
> 
> your account might also have been hacked, i received such mails
> from henry during the last two weeks :
> one from linkedin, one from twitter and you added me (with my swc
> account) to g+.
> 
> i can forward you these mails if you are interested.


I have different passwords for each account of course, but
you are quite right that it resembles an attack.

What happens in fact is that each of the Android/iPhone apps asks 
for access to your address book (and usually every other application 
on your smart phone), and after a not so clear message asking one to
invite people who are not on the network invites pretty much everybody 
in you address book who does not have an account with them, to join their network. 
It looks  like only LinkedIn goes so far as to spam public mailing lists ( or 
perhaps the others have been blocked allready ? )

In any case it seems that there is a law suite out against LinkedIn
for this behavior 
http://readwrite.com/2014/06/13/linkedin-lawsuit-privacy-terms-of-service

Google and Android don't do such an evidently bad job to grow their network,
and to collect data. They have more subtle ones: it's called the Cloud. 
   On  Android it seems that you have to use Google+ to synchronise your 
address book, calendar and the rest with your other computers.
   Apple recently removed the feature that allowed you to synchronise 
directly with your device. I know because I tried to help my father
with his new iPhone. Apple had remove the iTunes tab that allowed 
synchronisation and I was nearly resigned to signing him up to iCloud. 
Luckily there must have been a lot of pressure from customers
because I was happy to find that a recent OSX update put that feature back
in to iTunes.

Still the aim is clear: these companies want people to move all their users
data onto their servers. It's a bit like a protection racket: give us all your
data - we will protect you from the bad people and make your life so much 
easier.

The only way to escape this "Brave New World" is the creation of distributed 
secure social networks, where we don't need to go through a third party to
access our information and where we can connect in a peer to peer manner.
For that one needs LinkedData, Global Authentication ( WebID, and others ), 
Access Control, global protocols for read/write web ( LDP ) etc.

Henry

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Monday, 16 June 2014 07:20:12 UTC