practical privacy tips… with attitude

As if it were not easy enough to violate the trust of your mate with cheap surveillance equipment of all stripes, many companies are actively promoting software that can be covertly installed on a cell phone. After that happens to your mobile phone, the thing makes you an open book.

That said, if you’ve got to do a little snooping (and the target of your surveillance happens to use a Series 60 phone), it seems like a tool like FlexiSPY PRO might just do the trick. It’s got live phone monitoring for listening in on conversations in progress, email and MMS header logging, SMS logging, call history, duration, and activity meters, all for the low, low price of $150.

Luckily, the FlexiSPY software has already been classified as a trojan horse and added to F-Secure’s virus database. So, make sure you’re checking out what’s going on with your mobile phone, especially if you have serious trust issues in your relationship.

Here’s another case that demonstrates just how easy it is to violate someone’s privacy with a cell phone camera. While the devices are generally banned from locker rooms and other areas where people may be undressing, these enterprising high school students in San Diego demonstrated that anyone wearing a skirt is susceptible to the video voyeurism exploit known as “upskirting”.

A group of Hoover High School students is getting expelled because they used a cell phone to record underneath a teacher’s skirt and then shared the video among students, said the president of the San Diego Education Association, which represents teachers.

Not sure if this was a “hot for teacher” situation or these kids just wanted to humiliate the woman, but I’m sure they accomplished the latter. The ironic thing is the district would not discuss the incident or the punishment meted to the students, citing privacy concerns. How nice for them.

EFF privacy advocate and unhappy Street View model Kevin Bankston made good on his vow to try out Google’s take-down policy after THREAT LEVEL found a picture of his unwitting mug stalking the sidewalks near EFF’s offices. What he learned: Google is happy to remove you from Street View … provided you give them a wealth of additional information, including a photo of your driver’s license.

The State of Utah has a huge data security problem. They’ve somehow allowed the social security numbers of up to 20,000 children to be stolen by illegal immigrants who use them to get jobs in the United States and obtain credit cards. Kirk Torgensen, the Utah Attorney General’s Office Chief Investigator, seems to be at a loss on how to stop the practice.

Torgensen said the high number of illegal immigrants coming into Utah helped create a lucrative underground counterfeiting business where crooks can sell a fake Social Security card for $150 each.

“It’s hard to catch them, they move around a lot, as soon as you get some information on they move,” Torgensen said. “There are more of them than you probably think.”

Of course you know that the Social Security number was never intended to be a personal identifier, but we’re well down the road on that issue. Most of these kids won’t know they’re screwed until they are 18, and try to get a loan or a job. Parents should consider keeping an eye on their child’s accounts by going to the Social Security Administration web page at www.ssa.gov.

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages that no one except the intended recipient knows is there. This is in contrast to cryptography, where an interloper can see the message is there, but the hope is that they can’t crack it and read it.

Lifehacker has some excellent tips on this arcane privacy art:

Remember those invisible ink kits from when you were a kid? You’d write a secret message that no one could see unless they had a black light or the decoder marker. The digital equivalent of invisible ink is steganography software, apps that embed files and data inside other files, hidden from everyone who doesn’t know any better.

Check out the excellent tips Lifehacker offers with the post Hide Data in Files with Easy Steganography Tools.