Tag Archive for 'privacy'

I won’t be using Chrome.

Published by The Unreasonablemen on September 5, 2008 in Business. 3 Comments

A guest post from the unreasonablemen.net

A couple of reasons. Firstly unlike Firefox and Safari and of course the corporate supported IE, it doesn’t seem to get past the companies proxy server.  Second, and most importantly to me I’m not prepared to give Google any more information about myself.

 Don’t get my wrong, I’m a happy user of 3 Google services - mail, reader and analytics . But that’s about all i want Google to know about me. Read Write Web has a good history and synopsis of Google’s privacy  stance. To me, reading that I get uneasy… real uneasy.  Ben Kepes and I have debated this before, I can summarise his position as more trusting than mine. Simple as that.

 I know that Google has a stated position of “do no evil”. I also know what happens in companies when they get squeeze for revenue and profit. Not always the right things.  Reason number 1.

 Another way to think about this. Google is a company of nearly 20 000 people, they’re like a small city in terms of population. And even small cities have bad people.  In the US 1 in every 136 people have been caught and convicted of a crime, if you extrapolate that out it means you would expect a company the size of Google to have 147 bad people.  147 people who could mis-use all that data that they now have the potential to access.

 End of the day its your choice, but you should be aware of the privacy issues associated with cloud services.

  

PS I’ve dropped Firefox and moved to Safari as my browser of choice. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Can you really trust a bootstrapped startup?

Published by Ben Kepes on June 18, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, New business, SaaS and Web x.0. 10 Comments

RWW reports that online storage company DivShare, has had a security breach. Apparently a malicious user accessed their database which included user e-mail addresses and other profile information. They also say that no financial information has been accessed by any unauthorized parties. It’s not the first of these sort of problems, and there have been many tails of start-ups disappearing without trace and leaving user data floating around the web somewhere.

The specific cause of this breach aren’t important, what is important however is that users of web services feel secure using them. Can they feel secure when the start-up is living off the smell of an oily rag and not knowing where the next chunk of cloud storage (let alone salary paycheck) will come from.

It’s one of the reasons that Xero CEO Rod Drury gives for the fact that they IPOd very early on. Theirs is an application utilising the most sensitive of data, business financial’s, and Rod is adamant that publicly listing was imperative to build trust.

But what about other types of service? I use SugarSync, an online sync/backup solution. I’ve personally spoken with the CEO and I’m comfortable that they’re well funded and stable, but that is a perception based on faith rather than actual knowledge - who’s to say they also won’t go down tomorrow, next week or some other time.

Now I’m not suggesting that it’d be preferable to have every web app on earth rolled into either Google or Microsoft, but I would suggest a two pronged approach from users;

  1. Think about the end results of security breaches for the web apps you use - use multiple backups (even in the clouds), segregate data and don’t keep super sensitive stuff there
  2. Do good due diligence on providers. Enterprise customers have long known the necessity of this but individual users need to consider it as well

I know a number of bootstrapped start-ups (or started-ups) read this blog - I’d be interested to hear their thoughts on this subject.

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Good tool for those suspicious of Facebook

Published by Ben Kepes on April 21, 2008 in IT, New business, Society and Web x.0. 0 Comments

I got a press release the other day which will be great for those who have concerns about their privacy (especially coming after the Facebook Beacon fiasco). My Data is My Data aims to;

help counteract the collection and sale of personal information. This plug-in will be available through MyDataIsMyData.org. Selling private information for profit unbeknownst to the user’s is an abuse of their trust and MyDataIsMyData.org hopes to empower these user’s by allowing them to control the amount of personal information that they make visible.

I’m from the school of thought that says if you Facebook, Twitter, Blog and im at large, privacy would seem to be a secondary concern than connectivity. For those who do however have concerns, check out MDIMDs offering.

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