Category Archives: Privacy

Why You Should Never Give A Company Your Data

Here’s a great example of why you can never really entrust your information to anyone but yourself. The Register’s John Leyden reports that Pointsec Mobile Technologies, a data security company, has obtained via eBay a hard disk apparently owned by ”one of Europe’s largest financial services groups”. On the hard disk were, in the words of… Read More »

Didtheyreadit’s Response To Privacy Issues Part II

More on Alastair Rumpell’s response to my privacy concerns about his new email monitoring service, didtheyreadit.  (Here’s the first one.) I wondered how the email addresses harvested by Rampell would be used (These would include all emails sent from and to recipients via the service since as far as I can understand it didtheyreadit, unlike… Read More »

Didtheyreadit’s Response To Privacy Issues Part I

Further to my posting about Didtheyreadit, a service which allows the sender to know whether/when/where the recipient opened their email (and even how long they read it), here’s a response from the company’s owner and founder, Alastair Rampell, addressing my concerns about the serious privacy issues it raises. Alastair acknowledges “you are right in that… Read More »

Thanks For Reading My Email for 13 Minutes In Wisconsin

Just when I started agonizing about the privacy aspects of MessageTag, a company has come along with a service that makes the mail-receipt monitoring service look like chicken-feed. MessageTag allows users to see whether and when their emails have been read by recipients. It does this by inserting what privacy advocates called a web-bug into… Read More »

This week’s column – What Price Privacy?

This week’s Loose Wire column is about Gmail, Plaxo and privacy: PRIVACY IS ONE OF those things you either obsess over, or don’t see what all the fuss is about. You’re either someone who gets indignant when a shop assistant asks you for your home address at the checkout, or you’re not. You either hate… Read More »