Tag: Internet Freedom

Your Home’s Router is Spying on You

It must be spy on American’s week given posts on law enforcement asking for your cell data and how the NSA is going to expand its spying on Americans on a massive scale.  Now we have this:

Cisco Systems told users of its new high-end home routers — in a roundabout way — they couldn’t use their routers for porn or to send certain types of e-mail and a whole list of other things.  …

Last week, Cisco sent out an upgrade to the software that makes its routers work, called firmware. The upgrade affected two models, the EA4500 and the EA2700. Without asking, Cisco moved them to its “Cisco Connect Cloud” service.  …

[T]he Cisco Connect Cloud Terms of Service forbids a whole bunch of things including porn, sending advertising e-mails — it won’t even allow you to “encourage any conduct” that would violate the law.

Wait, there’s more. Cisco reportedly [also] deleted a portion of [its] privacy statement that said Cisco would keep track of Connect Cloud customers’ “network traffic” and “Internet history,” ExtremeTech reported.

via Business Insider.

Does anyone think any company could have gotten away with this in the 1960’s or 1970’s?  The outrage would have been tremendous.

We’re failing as a society to realize that it’s not polite to air our collective and individual dirty laundry.  And we should be especially wary of sharing our family business with corporations that usually have a cozy relationship with the government.

This is very very very bad.

In addition to establishing Internet Freedoms and Net Neutrality we need to start a national discussion on Internet Privacy.

Google’s Brin: Web Faces Greatest Threat Ever

The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”.   “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.”

The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.

via The Guardian.

I’m not actually a big “Brin” or Google fan.  Although I do believe the story is accurate, it may be nothing more than a Google play for more “openness” so that Google kind find out more and more about you… so they can track you.

We need to face the fact that Google is beyond spooky.  It tracks everything about you and has some undisclosed relationships with the government.  That’s not a good combination.

Perhaps Brin should do a little spring cleaning in his own house before pointing fingers at Facebook and others.