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New Mobile-Phone Privacy Law Proposed
Rep. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) unveiled draft legislation Monday requiring mobile-phone carriers to reveal if they are employing tracking software such as Carrier IQ.
“Consumers have the right to know and to say ‘no’ to the presence of software on their mobile devices that can collect and transmit their personal and sensitive information,” Markey said in The Hill.
Under the Mobile Device Privacy Act (.pdf), consumers would have to consent that data from their phones would be sent to third parties, like Carrier IQ in Mountain View, California.
Carrier IQ has said that its software was secretly installed on some 150 million phones. It conceded that it Read more…
Irene takes out cell towers, disrupts communications
Computerworld – Communications networks took a hit from Hurricane Irene, as 1,400 cell towers and cell sites were damaged or disrupted — mainly in Virginia, New Jersey, New York and North Carolina, the Federal Communications Commission said Monday.
In addition to cell site disruptions from power outages or other problems, 132,000 wired voice subscribers lost service as of Sunday, while 500,000 cable customers lost service, mostly in Virginia, an FCC spokesman said in an email early Monday. Three broadcast radio stations were also down for at least part of the storm, he said. The FCC didn’t say what percentage of the thousands of cell towers along the East Cost were affected.
On Sunday afternoon, when Irene was downgraded to tropical storm status, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said there Read more…
6 Biggest Tech Security Fails in the Last Year
This is the age of being perpetually connected. If you have a Twitter, Facebook or any other sort of account, your information is out there. The best thing to do is just keep the information you don’t want people to know offline. It’s just safer that way.
Now, let’s take a look at the times that the major companies have failed, big time. There are several of them, here they are.
1) Texas Workforce Commission – Identities Released: Social Security Numbers, Addresses, etc.
My home state (note: everyone on iSmashPhone is from a different part of the world). It was recently found that Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and other personal info, according to website ComputerWorld. Two security chiefs were fired over it, and while the Attorney General’s office says that there is no evidence that the exposed data has been misused, they did say that we should be careful about being targets of a new phone scam. Here is that press release. And everyone is worried about Apple? This was personal info for people who truly had no choice in the Read more…
How Our Government is Tracking and Databasing Your Every Move
Big Brother is Watching
The war on terror and cybersecurity are excuses that have spurred huge investments into the surveillance industry, which has become a war on “liberty and privacy.”
The Obama administration has moved forward with a Bush regime program to screen state computer traffic on private-sector networks, including those connecting people to the Internet, The Washington Post revealed July 3.
That project, code-name “Einstein,” is related to the much-larger, Read more…
Salt Lake City goes wallet-free with Isis
Trial run for national rollout
Operator consortium Isis has selected Salt Lake City as its flagship deployment to show the rest of the USA what NFC can do for them.
The plan will see Salt Lake City’s public transport system accepting pay-by-wave from a mobile phone by the middle of next year. Retailers have also been encouraged to adopt Near Field Communications technology at the point of sale, as Salt Lake City strives to become The Place You Can Leave Your Wallet At Home.
Isis was set up less than six months ago: a consortium of US network operators including AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. The consortium is dedicated to ensuring that electronic payments based on NFC keep their secure element in the SIM – under the control of the network operator, not the handset manufacturer or bank-card supplier – by promoting the technology and business models associated with it.
In Salt Lake City, that involves working with the Utah Transit Authority to convert all the buses and trains to accept NFC payments, as well as flooding the area with NFC handsets and SIM chips.
“I would like to express our excitement that the Salt Lake City area has been chosen to lead the roll-out of Isis mobile payments,” said Mayor Ralph Becker’s canned statement, though looking a little closer it becomes obvious why Salt Lake was chosen to lead the US into contactless payments.
The Utah Transit Authority already uses proximity payment cards, deployed in 2009, so adding NFC functionality to public transport is a matter of software not hardware, and while the City might be the capital of Utah it has a population somewhat smaller than Northampton, so presents a nicely sized area for experimentation rather than a sprawling metropolis where deployment would be more challenging.
But the transition to electronic payments isn’t going to happen overnight, and it’s good to see Isis doing something practical, and with a reasonably aggressive timetable. It will be interesting to see how the locals take to paying by wave.
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