Privacy Harbor™

Today, the PrivacyHarbor team released our new Beacon Desktop Email Notifier, now available for download. This new feature will alert users via a small pop-up window on their desktop when they receive a new e-mail message, regardless of whether they are logged into their PrivacyHarbor email account.

The new Beacon Desktop Notifier is free for all accounts and includes the following features:

• Beacon Icon Status – Unique icons in your system tray will show you when you are online and have new messages, or are offline and have no new messages.

• Inbox Beacon Message Preview – When the Beacon is active, you will receive a notice informing you when new messages have arrived in your inbox.

• SnapGuard Beacon Message Preview – You will also be notified of new messages in SnapGuard. By default, you will be notified twice a day about messages from unknown recipients that go into SnapGuard.

• Compatible with Windows 2000, XP, and Vista (Please note that Mac OS X is currently unsupported).

To learn more about PrivacyHarbor or to sign-up for PrivacyHarbor email account, simply follow the links or contact us at support@privacyharbor.com.

As always, we love to hear from our customers! Feel free to let us know what you think of the new Beacon Desktop Notifier.

On the surface, spam, viruses, identity theft, malware and a host of other things people expose themselves to on the Internet are a huge problem. These are all just a means to a profit for some, but the problem is not the fact that businesses profit on the Internet but how businesses profit on the Internet. At the heart of the problem are businesses and the user data they collect and rely on. Today, these new successful businesses are referred to as “Web 2.0 companies” because of all the new innovations that they are making. But it’s not the new innovations and new ways of interacting that are problematic; it is what businesses are doing behind the scenes with user data to earn their bread and butter.

Web 2.0 companies like Google are not there to serve their users. Their real clients are advertisers. Most of the successful businesses out there have discovered that personal data gathered on the web is worth something and people are willing to throw it away in exchange for access to fun social websites, mash-ups and other web 2.0 technologies. When Google was getting started and began collecting user data, they were aware of how much the data they had was worth and the potential for a public backlash against them for collecting it. Because of this, they were careful and cautious in the beginning. However, as time went on, they were more confident in their position and became more and more invasive in the collection of user data. And now, it is so bad that in many cases they even make the user’s ability to access their own data difficult. Recently, a website put out by an engineering team at Google is claiming to try and reverse that image. But are they really?

They are advocating and advertising an engineering effort to make it easier for users to move data in, as well as out of Google products, to and from competing products. The irony is that “moving data out” does not mean removing it from Google. Google still retains all data that crosses their systems. This is just more of the same effort to collect and utilize more data by encouraging users to migrate data from competing services. This is data that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

Is it acceptable for companies like Google and others to get their hands further and further into our own personal lives and track everything we do? Take Google maps for instance. How do you feel about the fact that Google maps has pictures of everyone they drive by on the street and possibly your picture without their or your knowledge? Do you think Google’s new PR website, DataLiberation.org will help you find the picture of yourself and not just download the copy but also help you remove it from Google’s clutches? No.

How can we get out of the Google trap? Sometimes it’s hard to avoid. The speed of life forces us to compromise by using some of these freely available services out of convenience. To combat this, as you find companies and services that don’t subscribe to an advertising model, promote them. Anytime you come across a web company that is actually servicing their users and customers, promote them by sharing them with others. Share them with your friends and family. Share them with strangers by blogging about them or talking about them here, or anywhere else that people are listening for change. That is what it is going to take to fix the heart of the problem.

I bet when the BBC’s television comedy series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus first came out with their 1970 “SPAM Sketch” they had no idea just how far the comedy bit would go and how popular the term “spam” would become in encapsulating all that is now unholy and relentless in the world of unsolicited, bulk electronic messaging. Today, you can almost hear those same Vikings drowning out our emails, chat room conversations and forum posts with the sound of “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, lovely Spam, wonderful Spam” every time you receive an unwanted advertisement about male enhancement or a ‘get rich quick’ scheme.

I still remember my first experience dealing with spam as a teenager in the late 90′s while I was in an online gaming chat room. Back then, chat room spam mostly consisted of spammers trying to interrupt legitimate conversations between users by posting the same word, phrase, or ASCII art over and over until it completely covered the screen. A couple years later, spam had already grown much more intrusive and was now geared toward advertising, chain letters and scams designed to bog down chat rooms, online forums, and email inboxes. I didn’t really take the expanding threat and annoyance of spam seriously though until one day, my mother received an angry phone call from AOL:

“What do you mean her account has been suspended? For what?! Pornography?!!”

Talk about having a lot of explaining to do – apparently, my email account (which was purchased under my mother’s name) was sending out hundreds of spam emails per day advertising porn websites. How did this happen? It turned out that one of the spam emails I received had instructed me to login to my AOL account to “verify user information” and said if I didn’t, my account would be shut down. So, like the gullible teenager I was, I clicked on the link in the spam email and was taken to a fake AOL login page that harvested my user name and password the second I tried to log in. It then used my information to log in to my real AOL account, access my email and send out spam. This seems like such an obvious scam to me today, but this is still one of the ways hackers dupe new email users and propagate spam to the point where spam now accounts for 94% of all emails sent.

The upside to my experience was that I learned a valuable lesson: spam is not to be taken lightly. So, you might think, “I only get a few spam emails in my inbox each day – so what?” Aside from the obvious irritation, spam emails can be extremely dangerous. Spam violates your privacy and security. Spam can pass along viruses and trojans that harm your computer and can harvest private data from your files. Spam is also responsible for a significant amount scams, phishing, fraud, risks to children and identity theft.

So, how do you stop spam in its tracks?

It’s quite easy actually. The first step is to become more aware of potential avenues for spam to attack. If you have a blog, forum, or a social media profile, change your account settings so all comments must be approved by you before they become publicly visible. This applies to your email as well. Avoid using any so-called “free” ad-based email accounts (like Gmail or Hotmail), and make sure your account’s spam filters and security settings are working properly. The second step is to be more aware of your Internet behavior:

• Do you regularly visit websites with a lot of pop-ups, adware, cookies and advertising?
• Do you register for free online accounts that ask you to provide a lot of detailed personal information?
• Have you ever opened an unsolicited email from a sender that you didn’t recognize?
• Do you publicly post sensitive information about yourself on social media websites, forums, chat rooms or within the content of your emails?

All of these activities can leave you at risk of attack by spammers, hackers, scammers and identity thieves.

Now, I’m not going to lecture you on your eating habits. As long as your spam stays in the kitchen and out of the Internet I say, to each their own.

About twenty years ago a data service – I forget which one – offered a set of compact disks for sale. It contained the names, phone numbers, addresses and demographic data for everyone in the United States. The product launch was drowned out by the howls of outrage from journalists and Congress. It was an unthinkable violation of privacy. It was Orwellian. The venture sank without a trace. For a while.

Ten years later David Brin wrote The Transparent Society making the case that secrets would soon be impossible to keep and that we shouldn’t even try. The Information Age would usher in an era where everyone’s life was on display. Governments would be models of transparency and openness. Corporations would throw open their records or pay through the nose for the privilege of keeping a few vital things confidential for a limited time. Privacy would be an outdated concept. A decade down the line he seems to be batting .500. While business and government have an increasingly broad view of what they can hide from the public the lives of the Little People are on display to an extent that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago.

Today? Ah, today is not at all like yesterday. We take it for granted that a few minutes or a few seconds plus a few dollars can extract anyone’s picture, phone numbers and address not to mention the most personal details of his or her life. People sign up for services which tell everyone in the world exactly where they are at all times. Friends of mine with Military Intelligence backgrounds describe how they used to agonize over photos in wallets, matchbooks and brands of cologne to try and piece together the outlines of a target’s contacts and associations. Today their subjects spend hours doing the work themselves with Facebook. Targeted advertising works so well that it’s killing traditional venues like printed newspapers. Twitter and Hotmail are free for the user because they are worth serious money to the real customers – advertisers.

In the last day or so I came across two very interesting takes on how much the world has changed. The BBC’s World Have Your Say featured a spirited worldwide discussion, also available as a downloadable podcast on how transparent our lives should be. My favorite security expert, the brilliant and very readable Bruce Schneier, wrote an excellent piece in the Japan Times. When you exchange information online it stays. Most data you think are private are only that way until someone else decides it’s worth something to share or sell them.

It’s not something most of us think about. We use credit cards. We tweet about whatever comes into our head and broadcast it. But it is very serious business which can have profound repercussions years later. The information we put out for the world to see is worth money to others. We should think about whether it’s worth something to us, how much we should value what we currently give away for free.

When people communicate, they want to believe that what they say or write is private. People take precautions every day to make sure information is shared only with the intended recipients.

Consider the example of people having a conversation in public. When you want to say something personal you will probably look around, lean in and either speak quietly. Sometimes you will hold your thought until you get to a more private location. You don’t want other people to know what you are saying.

The same should be true on the Internet. Most people don’t care if others know that they are going to go to a movie later that night. However, people often share personal financial, medical or legal information over the Internet.   They believe that these Internet conversations are private.  The reality is that much of the Internet is set up to gather your information to sell, spam or scam you. Recent estimates reported spam accounting for more than 90% of all email received.  What do you do to protect yourself? One way is to carefully understand the privacy policies of the websites you visit and see who owns your content. You will be surprised to find that in most cases you do not own what you write; often you don’t even own the content of your own emails.

While most companies don’t hire people to personally read your email, they do build computers to scan the content and sell that information to advertisers. These advertisements are specifically trying to exploit your personal information. Unfortunately, this often leads to serious issues such as spam and identity theft.

If a privacy policy is confusing it is often written that way by design. Many sites claim they don’t share their content with anyone, however between themselves and their subsidiaries, your information can spread over the Internet very quickly.

In addition to reviewing a privacy policy, a good way to tell that the company will exploit your privacy is by looking at their business model. If they have advertising on their site, advertising partners, or subsidiaries that have advertising, that is a telltale sign that they will in some way make money from your personal information.

You are the only person who controls what information you want to share. If you don’t want the world to know your legal, financial and medical history, be sure to carefully read the privacy policies and understand the true business model of the websites you visit.

We are excited to implement all the great suggestions from customers and visitors that we have received over the past year.  Some of the major differences that you will notice are the slide show and videos, a news scroll and of course our blog that you are reading now.

I’d like to take just a moment to describe a few of these new features. The first one is the slide show. Many people have asked us to tell them a little more about who we are and what the difference is between private email and common email. The slide show will explain that and much more.

Contained in the same area as our slide show is our video section. We will have weekly In The Know videos telling you about what is happening at PrivacyHarbor.com, as well as other topical videos that you see listed.  We will be updating these videos often, so check back and see what we’ve added. If you’ve created a video that you would like us to know about, just send a link to info@privacyharbor.com with your contact information and we’ll contact you if we add it to our video section.

Finally, we have this blog. We’ll share information about PrivacyHarbor.com, as well as privacy news that is most pertinent to private communications over the Internet. This section is built to be informative and interactive, that’s why we have it on our homepage. Please write to our blog to chat, ask about PrivacyHarbor.com or any privacy news that you come across. We look forward to hearing from you.

We are passionate about privacy and believe that your email communications should be private. Sign up for an account and tell your friends about us, so they too can take back their privacy with PrivacyHarbor.com.

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