Pierow’s Prattle

My Permissions is a free web service that links directly to the application permission management pages on eight social networking sites. (Such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Linkedin, Dropbox, Instragram and Flickr)  Click on the link and it opens the app settings control panel of the selected service in a new tab.  MyPermissions.org makes it easy to find the otherwise difficult to locate privacy settings that often go unaltered.

[http://mypermissions.org]

Reddit had an interesting post on removing yourself from online public information search sites.  In part:

“Thanks to LawyerCT for bringing this topic up on /r/technology. She also provided a list of the top sites online that hold data on you.”

Intelius.com* – Opt-out

Acxiom.com – Opt-out

MyLife.com – To request that a Member Profile or Public Profile be deleted, please contact Customer Care at 1-888-704-1900 or contact us by email at privacy@mylife.com. Upon receipt of these requests, and confirmation that you are requesting that your own profile be removed, please allow MyLife 10 business days to complete this removal. It may be necessary to contact you to validate that you are the profile owner requesting the removal. This is to ensure the correct identity and profile ownership before completing these requests, and is for the protection of our users and their privacy. (more…)

Security researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden revealed today that the iPhone and iPad 3G regularly tracks the location of your iOS device and records the co-ordinates along with timestamp in a hidden file.

Allan said in a post on O’Reilly Radar:

“Today at Where 2.0 Pete Warden and I will announce the discovery that your iPhone, and your 3G iPad, is regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file. Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps. We’re not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it’s clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations. ” (more…)

An article in The Economist explains:

“[Email disclaimers] are assumed to be a wise precaution. But they are mostly, legally speaking, pointless. Lawyers and experts on internet policy say no court case has ever turned on the presence or absence of such an automatic e-mail footer in America, the most litigious of rich countries.
(more…)

Zeroing or “wiping” the data on a disk is a practice that makes data on a disk less recoverable.  This does not ensure that the data can not be recovered but it certainly makes data recovery more complicated.  It is always a good idea to wipe a disk prior to donating or retiring a computer to help protect confidential information.

This procedure will erase all data on the disk and make it difficult to recover – needless to say, you should backup any important data prior to using this procedure.  Also note that this only applies to standard hard drives.  Solid state drives require special handling as noted in this post. (more…)