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Travelers arriving at U.S. borders may soon be confronted with their laptops, PDAs, and other digital devices being searched , copied and even held by customs agents -- all without need to show suspicion for cause. Notices are being proposed by the Privacy Office at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which last week released a report approving the suspicionless searches of electronic devices at U.S. borders. The 51-page Privacy Impact Assessment also supported the right of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to copy, download, retain or seize any content from these devices, or the devices themselves, without assigning any specific reason for doing so. Also, while in many cases searches would be done with the knowledge of the traveler in some situations, the report says, "it is not practicable for law enforcement reasons to inform the traveler that his electronic device has been searched." In arriving at the assessment, the Privacy Office argued that such searches of electronic devices were really no different from searches of briefcases and backpacks. They are needed to interdict and investigate violations of federal law at U.S. borders and have been supported by courts in the past, the assessment said.

Concerned that Google knows too much about you? The company provides many ways to protect your privacy online -- you just need to find them. Here are six good ones. 1. Know your privacy rights: Use the Google Privacy Center. This site includes all of Google's privacy policies, as well as privacy best practices for each of its products and services. Although the "legalese" of privacy policies can be difficult to understand, Google's Privacy Channel offers a library of short YouTube videos with practical tips on protecting your data when using Google products and services. Try the "Google Search Privacy" and "Google Privacy Tips" series. 2. Protect your content on the services you use. Some content that Google stores for you, such as photos uploaded in Picasa Web Albums, are public by default. You can protect your privacy when you upload photos by choosing the appropriate checkbox. Choices include "unlisted" (accessible only if you have the Web link, and not indexed by Web search engines) or private (viewable only by named users who must sign in). Another example: You can take a Google Chat "off the record" if you don't want the instant messaging transcript stored. In contrast, Google Latitude, which tracks your whereabouts by way of GPS-enabled cell phones, does not share your location data by default. You must authorize others to see it. Latitude stores your last known location, but not your history. 3. Turn off the suggestion feature in the Chrome browser. By default, Chrome retains a history of Web sites you've visited -- and the full text of those pages -- so it can try to guess which Web address you want as you type in the "Omnibox." You can turn the feature off by going to "Under the Hood" under Options and unchecking the "Use a suggestion service" box. You can also select other privacy options, including surfing in Chrome's "incognito" mode. 4. Turn off Web History. You may have turned on the Web History option, also called Personalized Search, when yo

Profile Optimization True Story: I'm at a party a few months ago - not the usual raucous affair that us search and social media types get into but a full on wine and cheese extravaganza. The kind of shindig Republicans go to and then accuse Democrats of loving when they get up in front of a "Joe the Plumber" type crowd. But I digress… After far too much wine the discussion turned to crazy work environments and I naturally brought up the Fortress of Googletude and it's predilection for hallway scooter parking and riding. A fellow party-go-er who I'll call "Natasha" to protect her identity, nodded and said, 'Yes it's true, I've been there too!" This led to a long, room-clearing talk about search and social media, the kind of talk that true geeks engage in while their spouses go off to chat about politics and religion. Somewhere between bottles Natasha said to me "Have you seen Google People Search?" "Google what now?" I replied. She went on to describe an internally searchable database that the Google folks showed her of people sorted by interests and web habits, ready to be rolled out to advertisers at some point in the future. Thank goodness for the red wine clause in their NDA. Well the future arrived today, at least partially, with Google's announcement that behavioral targeting is being rolled out to the AdWords content network. As the Googlelords put it: "With interest-based advertising, you will be able to reach users based on your past interactions with them, such as their visits to your website. We'll also provide interest categories, such as "sports enthusiasts," so you can reach the audience of your choice. Whether your goal is to drive brand awareness or increase responses to your ads, these capabilities can help expand the success of your campaigns." This is a most effective riposte to the OPA's announcement of new, ludicrous banner ad standards - why futz around with annoying crap no-one will clic

It's never been easier to get information on the run. Smart devices such as the G1 and Apple iPhone let you put the Internet in your pocket and go - down the block or across the country. But this convenience could cost plenty in lost privacy, consumer advocates and tech analysts say. Once data have been collected and warehoused, you lose control of it forever. "The Big Brother aspect of it is troubling," says Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., former chairman of the powerful House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Mobile consumers are especially vulnerable, Markey says. Unlike PCs, cellphones tend to be used by one person exclusively. The information they telegraph - on Web browsing, lifestyle and more - tends to be "highly personalized." That's the main reason mobile data are so prized: The information is incredibly accurate. It's also why Markey and other privacy advocates say the debate about online privacy will become even more intense as advertising migrates to the mobile Web. Mobile advertising is still relatively new - G1 users, for now, get ads only through search results, for instance - but it's clearly a hot spot. The market is expected to reach $2.2 billion by 2012, from about $800 million now, according to JupiterResearch. Ultimately, it could surpass the traditional Web, now a $20 billion ad market. Yahoo, Microsoft and other ad-supported search engines collect information as Google does. But the sheer size and scope of Google's data-mining operation - the Web giant performs more than 80% of all desktop searches worldwide - makes it a uniquely pervasive presence, says Chester. Google and Yahoo, the two biggest players in search advertising, say their self-imposed privacy policies are sufficient to protect consumers, noting that they do not collect or store information in a way that can be directly tracked to an individual. Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel for Google, says Google tries to make privacy language as

A list of user names and passwords for customers of Comcast, one of the nation's largest Internet service providers, sat unprotected on the Web for the last two months. The list was 8,000 lines long, but Comcast said late Monday that just 700 of those lines contained information for active customer accounts. Kevin Andreyo, an educational technology specialist in Reading, Pa., and a professor at Wilkes University, came across the list Monday on Scribd, a document-sharing Web site. Mr. Andreyo was reading a recent article in PC World entitled "People Search Engines: They Know Your Dark Secrets… And Tell Anyone," when he was inspired to find out what information about him was online. He searched for his own e-mail address on the search engine Pipl. The list on Scribd was one of four results, and it also included his password, which was a riff on his love for a local sports team. Statistics on Scribd indicated that the list, which was uploaded by someone with the user name vuthanhan2004, had been viewed over 345 times and had been downloaded 27 times.

Hunch.com helps users search for answers -- but first, it performs a detailed search on the users themselves. Launching today after a year in development, Hunch aims to supply users with computer-generated advice on thousands of lifestyle and consumer questions: What kind of dog should I buy? What should I get dad for Father's Day? Which book by George Orwell would I like? Most important, though, Hunch is not a search engine. Rather than scouring the open Web for information, as Google, Microsoft's new Bing and scores of others do, or collating written opinions, as Amazon.com does, Hunch computes answers by comparing what it knows about you to what it knows about people like you. "Ultimately, what we're doing is providing a kind of shortcut through human expert systems," said Hunch founder Caterina Fake, who also started Flickr.com, the popular photo-sharing site that was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. By first inviting users to answer as many as 1,500 questions about themselves -- an addictive kind of personality test that involves such diverse questions as political orientation, relationship status and whether you believe in UFOs and keep your closet organized -- Hunch looks to assemble a demographic profile whose depth could rival anything in the commercial universe. The New York company also believes that users stand to benefit from this kind of large-scale data farming -- not just from getting better answers, but also from discovering the many microdemographics to which they belong. Hunch also says it will not sell user data to marketers. But this promise, written into the site's privacy policy, is not precisely a legal contract, said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a new-media scholar at the University of Virginia, and the difference leaves the data it collects in a fuzzy domain.

Travelers arriving at U.S. borders may soon be confronted with their laptops, PDAs, and other digital devices being searched, copied and even held by customs agents -- all without need to show suspicion for cause. Notices are being proposed by the Privacy Office at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which last week released a report approving the suspicionless searches of electronic devices at U.S. borders. The 51-page Privacy Impact Assessment also supported the right of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to copy, download, retain or seize any content from these devices, or the devices themselves, without assigning any specific reason for doing so.

"If you're concerned about Google retaining your personal data, then you must be doing something you shouldn't be doing. At least that's the word from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt tells CNBC, sparking howls of incredulity from the likes of Gawker. But the bigger news may be that Schmidt has actually admitted there are cases where the search giant is forced to release your personal data. "If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities." There's also the possibility of subpoenas. And hacks. But if any of this bothers you, you should be ashamed of yourself. According to Eric Schmidt. Gawker highlights the irony of Schmidt's typically haughty proclamations. After all, this is the man who banned CNet for a year after the news site published information about him it had gleaned from, yes, Google. But the larger point here is that Schmidt isn't even addressing the issue at hand. Per usual. When the privacy question appears, Google likes to talk about the people asking the questions. But the problem lies elsewhere: with the millions upon millions blissfully unaware of the questions. If you're concerned about your online privacy, you can always put the kibosh on Google's tracking cookies. You can avoid signing in to Google accounts. And, yes, you can avoid using Google for anything Eric Schmidt thinks you shouldn't be doing. But most web users don't even realize Google is hoarding their data. CNBC asks Schmidt: "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?" But he answers by scoffing at those who don't trust Google at all. Not that you'd expect anythin

"A simple search query has exposed Google Voice mail messages (audio and transcript) for anyone to see and hear. As first reported here, a user entering "site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/*" into the Google search bar discovered random voice mail messages belonging to random Google Voice accounts (see screenshot below). Clicking on each revealed not only the audio file and transcript of the call, but it also listed the callers name and phone number as it would if you were checking your own Google Voice voice mail. I was able to replicate the issue and listen to several voice mail messages, including some legitimate ones with potentially sensitive information."

"Sherry Natoli is followed everywhere she goes while shopping online, but she doesn't mind at all. Natoli, who owns a seashell business in Tampa, does all but her grocery shopping on the Internet and even opts in whenever she's asked whether she's willing to have her online movements tracked by websites." Companies have been monitoring our online behavior for almost as long as there's been an Internet, often using our online footsteps (cookies) whenever we search, browse or buy online. Tracking technology has advanced so much that everything from how long we linger over a product description to whether we are searching for sexual-dysfunction drugs can be collected and stored on individual profiles. Our profiles are numeric descriptions, not our real names, but in some cases, it's not hard to determine personal information behind the numbers. Privacy concerns abound, and several privacy and consumer groups are urging Congress to enact laws on what can and can't be collected and for how long.

A data protection group has warned that opting out of Phorm will not prevent the technology from processing data that users enter through web site search portals. Companies such as Amazon, Wikipedia and LiveJournal have taken the decision to block the controversial advertising technology from scanning their sites because of the privacy implications. However, Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock has since admitted that, even if web sites opt out of the programme, ISPs supporting Phorm will still be able to profile users visiting those sites. "This is because Phorm can scan search requests entered in those sites, even if it cannot detect the web site pages users are viewing," Killock said. "For example, even if Google opts out of Webwise, when a user types in a Google query and they are using BT, it will still go through Phorm before it reaches BT." Killock added that Phorm does not gain permission from either senders or receivers of the information before it processes the data. Phorm uses browsing information to serve accurately targeted advertisements, and is soon to be rolled out under the Webwise brand by internet service providers BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk. However, as the time for deployment nears, the controversy surrounding the technology only seems to be increasing.

Plans by Internet service providers to deliver targeted adverts to consumers based on their Web searches threaten online privacy and should be opposed, the founder of the Web said Wednesday. "I just want to know that when I click on a link it is between me and the Web, and the Internet service provider is not going to immediately characterise me in different categories for advertising or insurance of for government use," Tim Berners-Lee told a Web conference in Madrid. "The postman does not open my mail, the telephone company does not listen to my telephone conversations. Internet use is often more intimate than those things," he added. New software called Webwise allows Internet service providers to show adverts to their clients based on their Web browsing habits instead of based on the content of a single Web page as currently happens. Several British Internet service providers, including BT and Virgin Media, have said they are considering using the software, which is aimed at making the Web more financially profitable for advertisers. With the help of other scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), Berners-Lee set up the Web in 1989 to allow thousands of scientists around the world to stay in touch. The WWW technology -- which simplifies the process of searching for information on the Internet -- was first made more widely available from 1991 after CERN was unable to ensure its development, and the organisation made a landmark decision two years later not to levy royalties.

Set of podcasts providing a road map through the 4th Amendment of the Constitution, particularly a 4th Amendment search. Intended to give you a step-by-step approach through the 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States as it applies to searches, your expectation of privacy and related issues.

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Parents of 18,541 Metro Nashville students will receive letters next week outlining a security breach that put their children's Social Security numbers online for three months. Advertisement Boston-based Public Consulting Group Inc., which holds a five-year, $2.6-million-a-year contract with the state to collect student data from various districts, corrected the error March 31 after a parent using Google to search her daughter's name found it - along with personal data for the students and 6,000 parent names. Art Staehling learned Wednesday that his teenage daughter was on the list and said he's concerned what could happen to her identity. "I find it hard to believe that an established company had a problem of this magnitude," Staehling said. The consulting group will pay for parents of affected children to check all family members' credit reports through Experian and for a year of monitoring. One of the group's owners, Stephen Skinner, said the error happened when workers running a test Dec. 28 on random student data inadvertently stored a file to an insecure directory. They discovered the error March 5 and took down the file, which contained student names, gender, race or ethnicity, date of birth, Social Security number and, in some cases, parent names. But they were unaware Google's search engine had already found the file and indexed it. That's how the parent, who is also a Metro schools employee, found out about the breach weeks later. Public Consulting Group worked with Google to take the information down.

With Twitter firmly established as the "conversation place to be," marketers are beginning to look for where they fit in. And that means tools. For the uninitiated, Twitter is a service that lets individuals exchange 140-character messages-via computer or mobile device-with groups of "followers." The result is a fast-and-loose, multidimensional conversation that falls somewhere in between blogging and text messaging, happening in real time between millions of users around the world. Luckily, the Web interface for Twitter.com is just the start of many ways to interact with and glean intelligence from Twitter conversations. There is big potential value for tapping into the Twitter-stream for insights into what customers are saying about your company's brand and its market. "Millions are leaning on Twitter pretty hard as a way to network and communicate with contacts new and old," said John Jatsch, a social marketing expert and operator of Duct Tape Marketing. He added that marketers have many options for how to use Twitter, including connecting with customers, monitoring conversations and testing new ideas. To use Twitter to its fullest, b-to-b marketers should consider using the following handful of tools and services: ??Twitter clients. It doesn't take long for most Twitter users to move beyond using Twitter.com to post and monitor their posts or "tweets." There are much more powerful tools at your disposal for reading, filtering, searching and posting to Twitter.com. The list of Twitter clients includes popular Mac client Twitterific; Adobe Air-based clients such as Twhirl, Tweetr and Spaz; Firefox add-ons like Twitterfox and TwitBin; and software that lets you track multiple social engines-such as Facebook, FriendFeed and even instant messaging as well as Twitter-like Digsby and AlertThingy. A new client receiving a lot of buzz is TweetDeck, which features a huge but customizable user interface that makes it easier to track posts, re

It's often the security issue that dogs Google, Microsoft and other purveyors of personal health records (PHR): How will so much personal medical data be kept safe? A tangential question for Google, however -- one that has dogged the search giant since its Google Health offering was first made available in May 2008 -- is whether Google's search-based advertising platform creates a conflict with storing personal health data. Speaking at the Mastermind Session at Everything Channel's Healthcare Summit in San Diego in November,Google Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives Alfred Spector told health care CIOs, solution providers and other attendees that Google intended Google Health as an extension of the Google brand, and it was and would continue to be entirely separate from Google's main advertising platform. Watchdog organizations have taken Google to task over that claim, however, with one, Consumer Watchdog, even accusing Google of trying to lobby Congress to allow it to sell medical records by loosening regulatory language in the stimulus bill. "The medical technology portion of the economic stimulus bill does not sufficiently protect patient privacy, and recent amendments have made this situation worse," wrote Jerry Flanagan of Consumer Watchdog in a Jan. 27 open letter to Congress. "Medical privacy must be strengthened before the measure's final passage, rather than allowing corporate interests to take advantage of the larger bill's urgency." Flanagan in the letter states that, "Google is said to be lobbying hard ... to weaken the ban currently in the draft measure on the sale of our private medical records." While Consumer Watchdog did not cite specific evidence of Google pushing for softer restrictions, Google responded to the group's claims on its Public Policy Blog last week. "The claim -- based on no evidence whatsoever -- is 100 percent false and unfounded," wrote Pablo Chavez, Google's Senior Policy Counsel. "Google does not sell health

The new year has come and gone on the Gregorian calendar. But the new year for legal technology is still in progress at LegalTech New York, where vendors are unveiling their new products and services and attendees are helping them celebrate. LegalTech attendees should revel in the number of vendor initiatives aimed at reducing e-discovery costs from acquisition to review and production. And, like last year, EDD vendors continue to design and manufacture their products for international litigation. But LegalTech is not all about e-discovery. There were still plenty of vendors with products outside the Electronic Data Reference Model. EDD PARTIES Readers should be aware that Index Engines can access and extract data from tape and tape libraries -- and can do so really fast. But now they can also extract data from network storage systems, file shares, forensic images and hard drives and still provide users a single point of access to it -- via a Web browser. Index Engines first indexes data on disparate resources. Once the index is compiled, data can be deduped, searched, reviewed and extracted on demand. Also note that Index Engines can now filter unwanted file types such as EXE, DLL, etc., during the indexing process to reduce the time it takes to review the data. Read LegalTech New York 2009 Coverage on Legal Blog Watch In preparation for the new year, Kazeon Systems introduced new pay-as-you-go pricing models that augment their current standard software licensing option and focus on case matters. Kazeon hopes the new pricing models allow customers to implement an e-discovery solution that does not require a major financial investment or lengthy rollout. Vendors are starting to "go left" of the EDRM to provide organizations a better view of the end of litigation via early case assessment tools. In fact, KPMG promoted the concept with a T-shirt emblazoned with "go left." Toward that end, Daticon EED announced the availability of its Early Case Assessment servic

A Harvard University fellow has developed a browser extension that stops advertising networks from tracking a person's surfing habits, such as search queries and content they view on the Web. The extension, called Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO), enables its users to opt out of 27 advertising networks that are employing behavioral advertising systems, wrote Christopher Soghoian, who developed it, on his Web site. Soghoian, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and a doctoral candidate at Indiana University, modified a browser extension Google released under an Apache 2 open-source license. Google's opt-out plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox blocks cookies delivered by its Doubleclick advertising network. A cookie is a small data file stored in a browser that can track a variety of information, such as Web sites visited and search queries, and transmit that information back to the entity that placed the cookie in the browser. Google's opt-out plugin comes as the company announced plans last week to target advertisements based on the sites people visit. Targeted advertising is seen as a way for advertisers to more precisely find potential customers as well as for Web site publishers to charge higher advertising rates. But the behavioral advertising technologies have raised concern over how consumers get enrolled in the programs, what data is being tracked and how the data is protected.

As arguments swirl over online privacy, a new survey indicates the issue is a dominant concern for Americans. More than 90 percent of respondents called online privacy a "really" or "somewhat" important issue, according to the survey of more than 1,000 Americans conducted by TRUSTe, an organization that monitors the privacy practices of Web sites of companies like I.B.M., Yahoo and WebMD for a fee. When asked if they were comfortable with behavioral targeting - when advertisers use a person's browsing history or search history to decide which ad to show them - only 28 percent said they were. More than half said they were not. And more than 75 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, "The Internet is not well regulated, and naïve users can easily be taken advantage of." The survey arrives at a fractious time. Debate over behavioral advertising has intensified, with industry groups trying to avoid government intervention by creating their own regulatory standards. Still, some Congressional representatives and the Federal Trade Commission are questioning whether there are enough safeguards around the practice. Last month, the F.T.C. revised its suggestions for behavioral advertising rules for the industry, proposing, among other measures, that sites disclose when they are participating in behavioral advertising and obtain consumers' permission to do so. One F.T.C. commissioner, Jon Leibowitz, warned that if the industry did not respond, intervention would be next. "Put simply, this could be the last clear chance to show that self-regulation can - and will - effectively protect consumers' privacy," Mr. Leibowitz said, or else "it will certainly invite legislation by Congress and a more regulatory approach by our commission." Some technology companies are making changes on their own. Yahoo recently shortened the amount of time it keeps data derived from searches. It is also including a link in some ads that explains how

Will monetary value increase the value of user's data on social networks?

Facebook and Twitter have helped make social networking a household word. Now they need to make money. Efforts to monetize the popular Internet services are increasingly a priority within the two companies, with Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone outlining several initiatives at the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York this week. And analysts and investors, in search of the next Google-like hit, are paying close attention to the breakneck speed at which Facebook and Twitter are adding new users. While the popularity of the two social media firms has yet to translate into the kind of revenue-generating machine that Google Inc developed with its search advertising business, some say Facebook and Twitter have become so central to the Internet experience that they are inherently valuable. "Both are new ways of communicating. And when you have a new way of communicating ... you benefit people enough so that there is going to be value there," said Tim Draper, managing director of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, noting that he regretted not having invested in either firm. In April, Twitter's website attracted 17 million unique visitors in the United States, up sharply from 9.3 million the month before. Facebook grew to 200 million active users in April, less than a year after hitting 100 million users.