Traces in the network

People / Personal information / Your vestiges

Traces in the network

1. Information that we leave ourselves

What they know more than one, ceases to be a secret or release a genie from a bottle

If you uploaded your obscene photo on the Internet, it is there. Maybe no one has seen it, rather none of those who know you, have not seen or have not seen it yet.
It does not matter if you closed this photo only for yourself or openly placed it.
Again and again people complain that they can not delete their old account or photos. On some solid photohostings, when you delete photos, you just delete the link to them and they are not only in your account. And try to look at them directly, they are there!

If you shared secret information with your friend - she's there.

A bit of cuisine

You go to a solid site. There everything is a famous name, solid, stylish design, exquisite functionality. You can upload your photo with almost no limits. I offer you a choice:
  1. Show to everyone
  2. Only friends (change friends list),
  3. just me.

  4. Disallow comments,
  5. only for friends,
  6. prohibit viewing the original and printing,
  7. prohibit browsing among fresh and better ones.
It's all so formal and we believe, as we believe in newspapers that (as we know) lie.

And all this information lies in the computer behind which the person works, exactly the same as we are with you. There is a crisis, they have a reduction, they fire him, but somehow they must live. And he copies material from this computer. Then he will try to sell it profitable. Maybe just give it an attractive look and sell it on CD in the subway. Maybe he'll just put it with the hope that he has a naked photo of the future newly-made Madonna.

Services

There are special services that look for information on the people you ask. Now you can search for people from photos. While this is not a perfect search, but this is no longer a fantasy.

Confidentiality

There was a service that sold information about citizens from various sources - the passport office, STSI. They closed it. The reason is the use of confidential information.

Output

Do you want to protect yourself? Think before you post information about yourself on the Internet.
If someone else posted information about you, it can not be used against you and you are protected by the privacy law. But if you put information about yourself, then you are to blame, nothing protects you.

2. Fingerprints

Last spring, a medical student, Philippe Markoff, registered on the world's most popular private notice board craigslist.com. There he arranged a meeting with a masseuse, came to her hotel, tied it up, shot and robbed him. Markof spoke to the site under a pseudonym, used a special mail address for correspondence, did not make any phone calls, and sent a one-time phone to send SMS. Despite all this, it was very quickly computed and caught. "On Craigslist, you leave traces more than using a mobile phone. If you see your hidden records, everyone can see them. Very few people understand this, "says Mark Rush, an ex-head of the Computer Crime Department at the Ministry of Justice, in an interview with Vanity Fair USA.


Each user who surfs the Web in his browser has a unique "fingerprint" and does not even think about it. As shown by Panopticlick research, 84% of browsers that go to the Web can be reliably identified. Settings JavaScript and Flash, the language of the system, the browser version (including the build number), the browser language - there are a lot of computer settings available for studying to third-party sites. In view of the fact that there are a lot of settings for these, and people are all different, the set of settings for almost any user is unique.

Collecting such data, the site can "identify" the user, even if it changes cookies or leaves the computer by changing the IP. Potentially such "fingerprints" are the sources of the most massive violations of privacy. If the total share of uniquely identifiable browsers is 84%, then among browsers with Flash or Java installed, this proportion is 94%.

Panopticlick was able to find unique identifiers for browsers, examining only 8 variables:

  1. The name of the browser (includes the build number, OS version, language, installed toolbars, sometimes - other information);
  2. HTTP headers ACCEPT;
  3. Information about whether cookies are enabled;
  4. Screen resolution;
  5. Time Zone
  6. Browser plugins, their versions and MIME type
  7. System Fonts;
  8. Information about supercookies (various extended cookies similar to Flash cookies).
The results of this study mean that in fact anonymity in Seth is unattainable not only in relation to government bodies and special services. Virtually any user can track an arbitrary site - deleting cookies will not save. However, these techniques do not solve problems that do not give rest to advertisers and other people willing to give their souls for user data. With the removal of "fingerprints" you can distinguish between two users, but you can not establish any information about them - preferences, income, favorite sites.

3. And who needs your data?

1.5 million Facebook accounts were hacked and put up for sale in one of the Russian-language forums. For a thousand compromised accounts with ten or fewer friends, cybercriminals have requested $25. Accounts with more than ten friends were valued at $45 per thousand.

But the question is: who needs them? Would you buy them? I will not give a broken penny. What difference does it make to what gender you are, when you were born, where you studied ... And the intelligence services have this information and without the Internet.

As a result, after such abduction, the uselessness of this information became apparent. Because it's better to store passwords, access codes and money.

Moreover, information in social networks can not be trusted, there may be mistakes, jokes ... For example, I'm not writing a real birthday, to receive congratulations on birthday, not spam.