Neo CortX

Prudent Privacy
in the information age

By Neo CortX PrudentPrivacy.com

1 Contents

1 2 3 4 5

Contents .......................................................................................................................................... 2 Copyright ......................................................................................................................................... 5 Terms and conditions...................................................................................................................... 6 The Experiment an introduction .................................................................................................. 7 What does prudent privacy mean?............................................................................................... 11 5.1 5.2 5.3 Prudent ................................................................................................................................. 11 Privacy ................................................................................................................................... 12 Combining the two words ..................................................................................................... 12

Learning from the past.................................................................................................................. 14 6.1 6.2 6.3 Baby steps towards privacy .................................................................................................. 14 The four seasons ................................................................................................................... 19 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 22

Scams ............................................................................................................................................ 23 7.1 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 28

Conversation with Paul ................................................................................................................. 29 8.1 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 31

Passwords ..................................................................................................................................... 32 9.1 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 37 VPN............................................................................................................................................ 37 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 39 The Onion Router - Tor ............................................................................................................. 40 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 41 Freenet and Darknet ................................................................................................................. 41 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 41 E-Mail - Updated ....................................................................................................................... 42 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 43 IRC and IM ................................................................................................................................. 43 Privacy in phone calls and text messaging (SMS) ..................................................................... 44

10 10.1 11 11.1 12 12.1 13 13.1 14 15

16 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 16.5 16.6

Big corporations ........................................................................................................................ 44 Microsoft ............................................................................................................................... 46 Yahoo .................................................................................................................................... 47 Baidu ..................................................................................................................................... 48 Google ................................................................................................................................... 50 Amazon ................................................................................................................................. 52 Facebook ............................................................................................................................... 53 The Like button ............................................................................................................. 54

16.6.1 16.7 17 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4 17.5 18 18.1

Summary ............................................................................................................................... 55 Cookies ...................................................................................................................................... 56 Firefox ................................................................................................................................... 56 Opera .................................................................................................................................... 56 Chrome.................................................................................................................................. 56 Internet Explorer ................................................................................................................... 56 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 56 Big Governments....................................................................................................................... 57 Why governments is a big problem ...................................................................................... 57 The implications for your privacy.................................................................................. 61

18.1.1 18.2 18.3 18.4 18.5 19 19.1 20 21 21.1 21.2 22 23 23.1 23.2 23.3

Example story of lack of privacy ........................................................................................... 62 GPS tracking story ................................................................................................................. 63 Trends ................................................................................................................................... 64 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 66 Encryption software and PGP ................................................................................................... 67 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 70 USB sticks .................................................................................................................................. 70 Why take the risk ...................................................................................................................... 71 Why I do it ............................................................................................................................. 71 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 73 Paul and James .......................................................................................................................... 73 The Five Laws of Privacy ........................................................................................................... 75 The first law of privacy .......................................................................................................... 75 The second law of privacy ..................................................................................................... 76 The third law of privacy ........................................................................................................ 77 Being fearful .................................................................................................................. 78

23.3.1

23.3.2 23.4 23.5 23.6 24 24.1 24.2

Create passion for privacy............................................................................................. 79

The fourth law of privacy ...................................................................................................... 82 The fifth law of privacy ......................................................................................................... 83 Summary ............................................................................................................................... 84 The future of privacy ................................................................................................................. 85 Intelligent machines.............................................................................................................. 87 Profiling ................................................................................................................................. 89 It s already happening ................................................................................................... 91 Imagine.......................................................................................................................... 92

24.2.1 24.2.2 24.3 25 25.1 25.2 25.3 25.4 26 27 28 29

Summary ............................................................................................................................... 96 The risks .................................................................................................................................... 97 What you need to hide ......................................................................................................... 97 Why you need to hide these things ...................................................................................... 99 Self-censorship .................................................................................................................... 101 Summary ............................................................................................................................. 103 Paul and James ........................................................................................................................ 104 About the author .................................................................................................................... 105 Summary of summaries .......................................................................................................... 106 References .............................................................................................................................. 113

2 Copyright
Copyright is a very interesting subject from a philosophical perspective. Though I do not think it s an optimal way for us humans to use ideas and function in society, I ve nevertheless chosen to include a copyright section here. The reason it s not optimal in society, is because technically there is no need to economize ideas and information, since it can be shared without loss of existing resources. If I have an idea of writing a book, and it gives you an idea of writing a book, then it s not like you extract material from my brain and put it into yours. You only need to economize resources that are limited in quantity; hence there is no need to economize ideas, as these can be reproduced at no material cost to the origin. Imagine if houses were copyrighted, and anyone who built a roof over their head had to pay royalty to the inventor of the roof. It would perhaps make the inventor rich in the short term, but the rest of the people would be freezing and sick. So in the long term they would not be able to produce computers that the inventor could use. Hence; everyone loses. How about hyperlinks (the links you click that takes you to a new site) on the web? It would stop the whole progress of the internet if those were patented. Google wouldn t exist, as the whole company originally was built on the properties of hyperlinks. What if the usage of electricity were patented? And how about jeans? What about colors? I will say I find strong evidence that suggest that all this intellectual property is not a benefit for society at all. Perhaps this subject should have a separate book, perhaps I ll write something on it later. So why do I still include some words on copyright? The reason I do is because our whole society is organized around this idea of copyright. That means that our society has constructed strong incentives for having this copyright, no matter the logical and rational errors, i.e. reduced life quality, that this imposes on all citizens of the globe, including the copyright holders. My primary hope is that many readers will enjoy this book and safeguard themselves against the dangers that are lurking in the future, and that one day we might live in a society based upon rational and logical thinking, and with the wonderful principle of scientific falsification being as important and self-evidently beneficial as the understanding of radio waves and the fact that the earth is round. If I get this long term reward; that you are able to
Every transaction will inspire me to create more products, and by using Bitcoin you don t need to worry about me finding out who you are. New to Bitcoin? Check out: www.weusecoins.com PayPal might be supported later, check out my webpage for updates: PrudentPrivacy.com Did you torrent this book or get it without paying for it? I m furious. Pay what you think prudent privacy is worth to the following address: 17cXfGxkY9qfLYM8TcycE5BRqZuVrK4E4x

take action to save your smart brain from the many lurking dangers, and you use your brain in an ethical and moral way now and in the future, then that is a great reward for me. Since we don t have this rational and logical society at all today, and since we live in a world where we pretend there is a free lunch for everyone , I am unable to implement some other good ideas that I have, and must instead try to derive some income from not the best, but still reasonable ideas, like this book. My hope is that I will get an income from this book, and this income I will use to keep me going in my quest to make this world a better place. A better place, that is, for a specific class of life; the humans, and also a specific kind of humans; others that are like me; people who don t expect a free lunch, but who contribute to making the world better. Hence, this book is copyrighted to Neo CortX for the time being. Copyright 2012 by Neo CortX All rights reserved.

3 Terms and conditions

This book is fictional and for entertainment and humorous purposes only. Though there might at times be some similarity to the real world, this is quite unintentional, should not be taken seriously and is not meant to hurt any person, group of people, institution, corporation, government or other ideas or physical entities. The views expressed are held by a fictional character called Neo CourtX , and not by any real life person or group of persons. The real life author(s) does not hold the views expressed in this book. At all times you should consult with your legal advisor before taking any action that might be suggested in this book. The author(s) cannot be held responsible for any of the text, pictures or ideas expressed in this book. All responsibility for this book belongs to the fictional character Neo CourtX, and any legal action has to be addressed to this fictional character. No physical person(s) is responsible for any of the content in this book. If these terms and conditions are not accepted, then you, any computer system or any virtual or physical entity cannot read or use this book or any content in it.

4 The Experiment an introduction

To test how well a random person was protecting his privacy, I did an experiment. I tried to figure out just how much I could find out about a pretty random person. All I knew was his brother s surname and what country he lived in. I had no personal relationship whatever to this person, but I had met his brother on some occasions. I had never seen this person in real life, and probably never will. This person is not a public person in any way, just a little bit different from an average person; he s got above average wealth. Having access to the web I used a set of different tools. I used one search engine for looking through companies, and I was able to find the correct surname. Since the brother I had met had bragged a bit about the other brother; he was doing ok financially, I was able to pick him out based on location of the company and the revenue and balance sheet of the company. This way I was able to figure out what his full name was, because he was on the board of directors of several companies. When that was done, the rest was quite easy. I used a separate search engine that specializes in finding stuff about persons, and within a few minutes I had a set of articles with pictures about this person. Within about 30 minutes, I had figured out quite a bit, all from public legal sources of information. Actually I found a lot more, but I don t want to give too much away. I found the following things: Where he lived That there were many rich people in that area Where his primary business was located How many businesses he owned How much revenue his businesses had Business phone number Cell phone number Email address Some biking-events he had participated in Using Google Street view (since I had already located the address) I was able to see his house. It was quite nice; a big white house. I was not able to see the car outside the house; he was probably at work when the Google Street View Car drove by. His approximate net worth, which was high His patterns of spending; anyone who are able to read financial statements can understand what s going on inside the mind of the leaders of a business.

Being an accountant, I am able to look at numbers from any business and understand how it operates. Understanding the numbers gives a person like me an X-Ray vision; I was able to understand how this person was thinking, how they like to spend their money, what things are important and what s not important. For example, if a lot of money is spent on office equipment , it s quite easy to understand that the furniture is nice inside the building, and perhaps there s valuable art on the walls.

If I had spent a few hours, I would easily figure out how many relatives he had and when they were using the home. I m just very glad that there are few criminals who are particularly smart, because all that information would make a burglary quite easy if anyone intended to do something like that. Oh, and by the way, I didn t even check out his Facebook page, I didn t check if he had any blogs, or if he had some kids or a wife that wrote blogs. Adding that to the mix, and I would be able to get triple the amount of information about him. To me, this was a strong wake-up call, and it gave me a really creepy feeling that I was able to figure this much out so easily. If it was this easy for me to figure all this information out within a very short time about a random person, how much easier would it be for some people that actually set up systems to do bad things? I just used a few search engines, but any C-grade computer student would be able to write some software that could extract this information in seconds based on something as simple as a phone number. When I saw what I could do in 30 minutes, I knew that I had to make some changes to my life. I needed to get prudent privacy.

I often look at how privacy is treated today, and I become frightened. Do the people around me know nothing about history? Don t they understand how badly they can be hurt when they expose so much information about themselves? Don t they think about the fact that information they put on the web will be there forever? The conclusion that I ve come to over and over is very simple: No. They don t. They don t understand, they don t think about the future, and absolutely no, they don t understand history. They think that because everyone else does what they do, it s safe.

What will happen the day that the political environment changes radically, and some minority group in society is used as scapegoat? Do people think about the fact that every single person is part of some kind of minority? Does my friends consider the fact that the only certain thing is change, and do they understand that sometimes the change can be violent, huge, and perhaps not for the better? Have they heard the warnings from Nassim Taleb and Benot Mandelbrot, or don t they even know who these people are? Are they prepared for a drastically different political and economic environment? Do they know what kinds of information are gathered about them on the web? Do they know how accurately each individual can be traced across websites and across the world? More than anything, do they understand that there is no free lunch, or are they nave enough to believe the oldest lie in history? I figure there are few answers to my questions. The logical conclusion I have to draw is that most people don t study these things, even though one day their lives might depend on it. They prefer to think about the short term, perhaps a few days or months into the future. What s going to happen 3 or 10 years from now seems completely irrelevant to most people. I have seen first-hand the consequences of being able to think long-term. One friend of mine, Paul, has all his life been into short term satisfaction. Today he is drinking too much, he s smoking, he s fat and unhealthy, poor and living off government handouts. He is angry at society, and when he is drunk he can get completely out of hand and gets violent. On the other hand, I have this other friend, James, who all his life has focused mostly on the long term. He worked hard, did many mistakes and focused on becoming smarter and better. Today he s got a sizable investment portfolio, especially for his age, he s very smart; he understands business and keeps improving his life, and he is exercising regularly and he s got an athletic body. He is a happy person even though he is aware of dangers and risks; he has learnt to handle his problems and protect himself from risk. 10 years ago the difference between the two people didn t look as much. But today the difference is huge, and the unhealthy Paul will probably never be able to catch up with James, who is the healthier person. I think Paul can still improve his life, and being a bit behind is no excuse to not change and improve, but reality is that James will stay ahead of Paul no matter what Paul does.

The same goes for privacy. Some time ago I decided that I wanted privacy in my life. I was inspired by reading history, and I started to educate myself on the subject. Today I am well ahead of most people, and because I continue to pick up information on the subject, I will probably stay well ahead for as long as I live. I ve been talking a lot with James about privacy, and also a bit with Paul. James actually implements ideas that we discuss. Paul on the other hand, he doesn t usually want my advice, and in the rare occasions where he listens and I come with a suggestion, he usually says he will do something about it later . James now lives in a foreign country. Paul lives partly with his parents, but is sometimes renting a house an hour s drive away from home. James uses foreign companies to protect his assets. Paul has no corporations, and no assets, and the only money he s got is invested in online poker and his car. He s got a nice car that s falling in value every day. James uses virtual private network to hide what content he s reading online. Paul doesn t care much what the internet service provider knows about him. Paul got nothing to hide as he says. James uses different email accounts for different purposes, so that it s harder for people to connect the dots. Paul receives all kinds of spam, dating mails, friend s mails and occasionally business mails into the same inbox. James is skeptical about Google and the US government and what will happen when the economic problems keep increasing. Paul doesn t care much about politics or economics, and he uses the personalized Google searches, G+, Gmail and lots of other Google products. It s all for free is his favorite comment on the subject. James sees the dangers lurking in the CDS and bonds markets, and understands how these markets can have a huge indirect impact on his privacy and well-being. Paul has no clue what a credit default swap is, and doesn t understand the function of the bond market.

5 What does prudent privacy mean?

When talking about prudent privacy, it s important to understand what it means. I find it quite interesting to look at words, and the two most important words we will deal with in this book is prudent and privacy.

5.1 Prudent
I take a definition from Wiktionary (2012b):

Another definition (Answers.com, 2012d):

What these definitions gives us, is basically that if you are prudent, you re able to foresee what s coming, you are wise, frugal and economical, you judge well.

5.2 Privacy
If we again go to Wiktionary (Wiktionary, 2012a), we find:

And going to Answers.com (Answers.com, 2012b):

Privacy is basically that you are free from unsanctioned intrusion, that you have certain things that you and only you have the view of. For example, most people prefer to be able to use their bathrooms and bedrooms without having surveillance cameras there. It s just very creepy if one of your Nabors points a camera at your bathroom window and has it recording when you use the bathroom.

5.3 Combining the two words

When we combine the two words, we get to one of the main points of this book. There is a certain level of privacy that is prudent for you. What is prudent depends upon some factors like: What your job is What expectations you have about the future What you think is creepy and not

For example, if your job is to be a public person, you are in the news or TV; then the prudent level of privacy will be completely different than for a person like me, Neo CortX. If your job is to be a policeman, then you will want privacy about your home address, so that the criminals you arrest can t come after you. If your job is to fire people when the company you work for is about to go broke, then you might also want to hide your address so that the people who have lost their jobs don t go after you when you did your job. If you are a news reporter who covers a story about some corruption in a government, then if you are prudent, you will want to avoid allowing them access to your email account. This is unlike what happened to Shi Tao, who was jailed for 10 years after having his email compromised (BBC_News, 2005). What expectations you have about the future is also very important. Say that you think that World War 3 is coming, and you don t like the idea of dying, you prefer to live. If you are young and in the age group that could be drafted, then you might want to take actions to protect your future from this danger while it s still politically accepted to take action. If such a time comes that the drafts starts, it might be too late to take action. If you are expecting peace and prosperity for the coming 50 years, then you will not have to take these actions at all. The third point is what you think is creepy and not. There are quite a few people in the world who seemingly don t mind having their pictures taken in swimsuit and posted on the web. Others find that even having a picture taken from 100 meters away and posted on the web is quite intrusive to the privacy. Prudent privacy is the level of privacy that protects your future. Some of you will have to implement all the tips given in this book and more. Others will only have to implement some of the basics, like proper usage of passwords. No matter what level of privacy you feel is prudent, I advise you to start learning about this subject. It s a big subject, but the rewards are well worth the effort. It might just save your life down the road or at the very least, give you a feeling or personal responsibility and that you are in control of your own life. This journey has for me become an adventure; my life has become exciting and meaningful. I hope you will join me so that you too can start the journey towards prudent privacy.

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Of course Neo CortX, I feel the same way when talking to others about subjects they don t know much about. James was calm and relaxed.

6.2 The four seasons

Ok, I ll try to explain, and I ll try not to stray too far from the subject. If you read about the mentioned subjects and more stuff from history, you will find that they have much in common. The actors are different, the places are different, and the colors are
Discovering patterns

different. But many components are repeating with high precision. Basically there are different stages in a society; each is lasting usually about 50-75 years.

After leaving school I figure I could finally start learning something useful, and one of the subjects I ve become very interested in is history. In school history was topping the high-score list of boring subjects, but after understanding how I could use lessons from the past to enhance my future, history became very interesting. Instead of memorizing irrelevant dates taught in class, I was able by my research on the web to find abstract patterns that repeated through history. The patterns I found included how societies had a lifecycle. These cycles play a very important part in the history of each nation, though most people are completely unaware of the patterns.

First we have the early spring time, things are growing, life is getting better, people are working and working hard. If they don t find a job, they start their own business. Almost nobody expects something for nothing; everyone pays his way through life by providing services or products to his fellow men. Since people pay for themselves and don t expect the government or their Nabors to pay, taxes are limited or non-existing. Gold is used for money, or perhaps even there is such level of freedom that people can decide for themselves what kind of money they want to use. Privacy is not a big concern, but the desire for privacy is highly respected. It s easy with hard and smart work for the poor to become rich and for the rich who are lazy to slip into poverty. Poor is getting richer, rich is getting richer. Second phase is summer. Times are good, after a long period of growth there is much more wealth in the society, and people can afford to relax a bit more. The children of the spring generation are growing up, and these kids have higher expectations. They are not used to working so hard. More people start to get dependent on

the government. Welfare seems to be rising; government gives free health-care and other services. The government can allow itself to tax the population more, since the people are not

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Well, I mentioned a few; you can access sites that are illegal in certain jurisdictions, like Facebook, Skype, certain Wikipedia articles etc. This is quite practical if you are travelling through a country where they have different laws than what you are used to, and you need to access your Facebook profile or check up some content on Wikipedia. Another, and in my opinion the biggest advantage, is that you hide your traffic from the local ISP or internet service provider. So if the local government wants to see what political views you have and writes a new law that requires the ISP to scan all content you ve accessed, they will have a much harder time finding out what sites you ve visited if you use VPN, since not even the local ISP normally know that. Though it is possible to analyze the traffic as it comes out of the VPN tunnel , at least you re making it much harder for them to trace you.

A third advantage is that you can access content that is only accessible to certain jurisdictions. Say you live in the UK and want to access content that is only available for people located in the US. If you have a VPN connection to a server in the US, then your traffic seems to be coming from the US (and it actually does), so you can now access the content. Many news providers has restrictions like this.

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13 E-Mail - Updated
How secure is email? James was on it again. Well, it depends on what you re expecting and how you use it. I replied. For some purposes, email is just fine. You just need to know about its strengths and weaknesses. And what are the weaknesses of email? There are quite a few. We can begin with the fact that some email providers don t use SSL, or encryption, when transferring your messages. This of course is dependent on the provider, and Google is an example of someone who does a good job here. The providers who don t use encryption will allow outsiders to tap the traffic that happens between your computer and the server. While this hopefully doesn t happen too often, it s still a risk. What this means is that you as a user might risk that your email is watched by any random person who wants to look at your email. Your Internet Service Provider, and any monitoring facility is just the beginning. You don t require much hacking skills to be able to listen in to unencrypted email. Another risk with using email is that the content is stored and transferred unencrypted. That means that any device that s routing the traffic is able to read the content. Some nations even implement storage of certain abstract data about the traffic that happens across the borders. This might include who you sent email to, at what time, and from what IP address. So the basic idea with email is never to send anything that you don t want the whole world to know, including people in a different political environment in the future. If you know about the weaknesses, email is good for certain limited use. Uncritical usage can come back and bite you bad, and many cases in court have been decided by people being sloppy with their email. A third risk is of course that any email service provider can be a subpoena; this means that they are required by law to open the email account and show the content to the court . And the advantages of email are quite obvious. Anyone I don t know about? Most of them are all quite obvious. However, one thing that most people don t think about is that one big risk of using email is sending email in a state where you are highly affected by feelings or some kind of intoxication. By doing this, you re almost sure that you will regret it, and you don t want to

Stop sending sensitive information unencrypted over email. Its very dangerous to most people. Use face to face or encrypted communication.

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