Here’s another piece for our Privacy Corner. Today we wanted to tell you about Internet Privay in China. It’s not some exotic story. It’s reality that some day may turn into reality for you.

So here’s what it’s like to be there.

China has a long history of limiting the information that its citizens receive, but new efforts to censor the Internet by stopping the transmission of unauthorized material has posed a difficult challenge for the communist regime.

Nevertheless, they actually managed to cope with it.

There are two types of intusions that occur in China regarding the internet: the alleged intrusion of the company providing users with Internet service, and the alleged intrusion of the Chinese government. The intrusion allegations made against companies providing users with Internet service are based upon reports that companies are using their access to the internet user’s private information to track and monitor user’s Internet activity. The claims made against the Chinese government lies in the fact that the government is forcing Internet-based companies to track users private online data without the user knowing that they are being monitored

An actual example what it means in reality:

A Chinese journalist, who was also a Yahoo! user, sent private emails using the Yahoo! server regarding the Chinese government. The Chinese staff of Yahoo! intercepted these emails and sent the journalist’s reportedly bad impression of the country to the Chinese government, which in turn sentenced the journalist to ten years in prison.

Such cases have been reported numerous times! If you think it may never happen to you, you may change your opinion.

Since FBI now have gone probably too deep into fitghting with … terrorism. “How’s that related?” – you’d ask. Here’s how:

Wanting some privacy in a publuc place now makes YOU a potential terrorist!

According to the FBI they should gather as much information about you as they can and they should report you to the authorities immediately. Their “suspicious activity” applies to the following things done in public:

“Are overly concerned about privacy, attempts to shield the screen from view of others”

 “Always pay cash or use credit card(s) in different name(s)”

 “Act nervous or suspicious behavior inconsistent with activities”

“Are observed switching SIM cards in cell phone or use of multiple cell phones”

 “Travel illogical distance to use Internet Café”

“Evidence of a residential based internet provider (signs on to Comcast, AOL, etc.)”

 “Use of anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address”

“Suspicious or coded writings, use of code word sheets, cryptic ledgers, etc.”

 “Encryption or use of software to hide encrypted data in digital photos, etc.”

 “Suspicious communications using VOIP or communicating through a PC game”

 “Use cash for large transactions or a credit card in someone else’s name.”

“Arrive with unusual amounts of luggage.”

“Make unusual inquiries about local sites, including government, military, police, communications, and power facilities.”

“Refuse cleaning service over an extended time.”

“Use entrances and exits that avoid the lobby.”

“Abandon a room and leave behind clothing and toiletry items.”

“Do not leave their room.”

“Change their appearance.”

Out of all of that we’re making one simple conclusion: Citizens in China and the US can no longer be sure their Interet activites remaining private.

We strongly recommend you to use our tools to keep you safe.

This means that our American users will be getting much higher speed now. Congratulations! We are very happy about our improvements!

Have a great day and enjoy your secure downloading – now a faster one!

-          Your TorrentPrivacy Team

We’ve been talking a lot about the importance of privacy lately. It’s high time to get practical and discuss some tools. Here we’ve chosen the most important and highly used privacy tools you should definitely check out!

1. Bittorrent Anonymizer

Yes, it’s us With our Bittorrent Anonymizer downloading torrents will become completely anonymous. Not even your ISP can catch you!

2. Google Dashboard

It doesn’t sound like a tool, but it is. Go to the Dashboard and you’ll be surprised how much Google knows about you. From one central location, you’ll be able to change your privacy settings for different Google services like Blogger, YouTube, Docs, Gmail, Picasa, and Profiles.

3. Incognito mode in Chrome

Not everyone knows that Google Chrome offers incognito browsing. Pages you open and files you download while in incognito mode aren’t recorded in Chrome’s browsing or download history. It’s a very good feature, since you don’t have to erase your histroy manually. Either you use public computer or yours, other users just won’t find it in your history!

4. Tor browser

When you surf the internet, the web-sites you visit can see where you come from.

Tor distributes your data transactions over several places on the Internet, so no single point can link you to your destination. The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you — and then periodically erasing your footprints. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several relays that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it’s going.

Nevertheless, Tor can’t solve all anonymity problems. Their web-site say, that it “focuses only on protecting the transport of data. You need to use protocol-specific support software if you don’t want the sites you visit to see your identifying information”.

5. TorrentPrivacy VPN

Our VPN picks up just at where Tor can’t help you no more. We actually encrypt your web-surfing activity. It’s not limited to browsing, but includes your email, Skype, ICQ, FTP and others.

We hope it’s been helpful! Have a safe day! ;]

Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. dedicated their sceintific work to social media.

They define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

This is a very good definition, because there is a growing tendency to reveal your identity on the Internet. Anonimity is disappearing. From the definition you can clearly see, that public profiles are the essence, the inner natutre of scoail networks. Internet is not a facelss place anymore. It’s a place where you present your image now.

While we think it’s true, we are here to warn you about the dangers.

The potential dangers include:

1. Identity theft. It’s a form of stealing someone’s identity in which someone pretends to be someone else by assuming that person’s identity, typically in order to access resources or obtain credit and other benefits in that person’s name. Identity theft occurs when someone uses your personally identifying information, like your name, Social Security number, or credit card number, without your permission, to commit fraud or other crimes.
Just keep in mind that numerous of celebrities have claimed to have their Twitter accounts hacked. Someone could hack yours… so we suggest you care about your privacy!
2. Sexual predators. Most major social networking sites are committed to ensuring that use of their services are as safe as possible. However, due to the high content of personal information placed on social networking sites, as well as the ability to hide behind a pseudo-identity, such sites have become increasingly popular for sexual predators. In 2009, it was revealed that MySpace had evicted 90, 000 registered sex offenders from its site in the previous two years.
3. Stalking. Post your address and locations you hang out at, and some maniac can easily find you. Please be careful!
4. Unintentional fame. Privacy concerns have also been raised over a number of high profile incidents which can be considered embarrassing for users. Here’s an example. This video, viewed by almost 27 millions of people, has changed the life of this person. As you may guess, not in a good way.
5. Employment. Your current and potential employers monitor social networks. For sure. So think before you post anything in there.

There are some steps to protect your privacy, though:

1. Use a strong password different from the passwords you use to access other sites. See PRC’s 10 Rules for Creating a Hacker-Resistant Password
2. If you are asked to provide security questions, use information that others would not know about you.
3. Use our TorrentPrivacy VPN, so that no one could steal your password through accessing the data you transfer to the internet.
4. Never provide a work-associated email to a social network, especially when signing up. Consider creating a new email address strictly to connect with your social networking profile(s).
5. Consider not using your real name, especially your last name. Be aware that this may violate the terms of service of some social networks.
6. Review the privacy policy and terms of service before signing up for an account.
7. Be sure to keep strong antivirus and spyware protection on your computer.
8. Provide only information that is necessary or that you feel comfortable providing. When in doubt, err on the side of providing less information.
9. Be sure to log off from social networking sites when you no longer need to be connected. This may reduce the amount of tracking of your web surfing and will help prevent strangers from infiltrating your account.

We hope you’ll take into account what we wrote here. We care about your privacy, because it’s just what we do! Have a nice day!
- The TorrentPrivacy Team

The so-called Copyright Alert System (CAS) aims to warn Internet users who illegally download and share music, videos and other copyrighted content over peer-to-peer file sharing networks.

Internet users identified as engaging in illegal file sharing will receive a graduated set of warnings from their ISP.

Initial alerts will be “educational” in nature, informing users about the consequences of copyright infringement, according to a description of the program by the Center for Copyright Infringement (CCI), the entity in charge of the system.

Internet users who continue to illegally share content sharing will next receive a so-called “acknowledgment” alert requiring them to click a link on their browser to acknowledge they have seen the notices.

“For accounts where alleged infringing activity continues, enhanced alerts that contain ‘mitigation measures’ will follow. These mitigation measures will vary by ISP and range from requiring the subscriber to review educational materials, to a temporary slow-down of Internet access speed,” the CCI noted in its announcement last week.

The CCI did not specify what would happen to users who continued illegal file-sharing activities even after receiving warnings. But it insisted that ISPs would not terminate a consumer’s Internet service under the Copyright Alert System.

“Contrary to many erroneous reports, this is not a “six-strikes-and-you’re-out” system that would result in termination. There’s no “strikeout” in this program,” it said.

The CCI last week noted that ISPs will begin to implement the program over the next two months.

The CCI is a collaborative anti-piracy effort involving U.S. content creators and five major ISPs. Members of the initiative include the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner Cable. The group also includes several associations that represent independent film and music producers.

Under the Copyright Alert System, content owners will be responsible for monitoring file-sharing networks and for identifying any alleged illegal activity. The ISP will then send out graduated alerts to the owners of the IP addresses associated with the infringing activity.

In an email to Computerworld, a spokesman from Verizon said CCI’s blog post last week accurately describes the Copyright Alert System being rolled out by Verizon. AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable (TWC) did not respond to request for comment on the program.

In comments made to Techhive, a TWC spokesman is quoted as saying the company will follow the same procedures outlined by the CCI last week.

However, the TWC spokesman said that it will temporarily cut off Internet services for users who receive a fifth warning.

The suspension will remain in place until the account holder calls Time Warner Cable “so you can listen to us preach about copyright infringement,” the TWC spokesman is quoted as saying in the Techhive story.

Internet users who believe they have been wrongly accused of copyright infringement by ISPs will have a right to appeal the suspension through the American Arbitration Association, a neutral dispute resolution organization, according to the CCI.

In the case of TWC at least, Internet users will need to pay an upfront fee of $35 to file an appeal. The fee will be refunded if the appeal is upheld, according to Techhive.

David Sohn, general counsel and director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s (CDT) Project on Copyright and Technology said the Copyright Alert System could serve a useful purpose if used purely for its stated purpose of educating users.

The key though will be the manner in which it is implemented by ISPs, Sohn said.

“If it stays focused on informing and educating people we think it could make a positive contribution to reducing infringement,” Sohn said. However, the system could have the opposite effect if used as a tool to impose punishment, he said.

“It can play a positive role towards education but not for meting out punishment,” Sohn said.

Stakeholders need to ensure that the system is not used by ISPs to cut people off the Internet based purely on the basis of private notices from content creators, he cautioned.

CDT is one of several advocacy and rights organizations that have been called into to play an advisory role in the CCI.

The Copyright Alert System formalizes a practice that ISPs have quietly used for several years against egregious copyright infringers said Gigi Sohn, president and CEO of Public Knowledge, another advocacy group that is advising the CCI.

The system is set up to minimize false alerts and will ostensibly be used to issue alerts only to those who download or distribute entire copyrighted works, said Gigi Sohn (no relation the CDTs David Sohn).

Considerable effort has been put by the CCI into ensuring that the alerting is not done is a “very finger wagging way because that would just not work,” she said.

ISPs have a vested interest in ensuring that the Copyright Alert System becomes a success, Sohn said. U.S. content creators have been relentless in their effort to curtail piracy and would have lobbied Congress heavily for some sort of legislation if ISPs had not gone along, she addd.

Corynne McSherry, intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, expressed serious reservations overthe alerting system.

The graduated response mechanism is triggered by a mere allegation by content creators, she said.

The system offers no easy way for users to independently investigate the allegations against them or to hold content owners responsible for false allegations, McSherry said. Subscribers also get very little time to defend the allegations against them, she added.

“Internet access has become an essential service in the digital age,” McSherry said. “Just as we restrict the power of utilities to turn off services to their customers, we should not allow content owners to cause Internet access providers to degrade or suspend their services without adequate due process.”

Original source: Jaikumar Vijayan, Computerworld.  http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9232779/Rights_groups_wary_as_ISPs_roll_out_Copyright_Alert_System

In this post we’ve tried to list the most important ones, so that you knew what to protect yourself from!

Here we go:

1. The first danger is cookies.

Thanks to them many programmers can:

• find out the placing of a personally-identifiable tag in a browser to facilitate web profiling, or,
• use thr cross-site scripting or other techniques to steal information from a user’s cookies.

Governments and organizations may set up honeypot websites – featuring controversial topics – with the purpose of attracting and tracking unwary people. This constitutes a potential danger for individuals, because you exchange cookies with every web-site you visit.

2. Second danger is simple posting your pictures on the Internet!

Some phones and tablets including iPhones automatically attach the latitude and longitude of the picture, unless this function is manually disabled.

What’s more, the face recognition technology can be used to gain access to a person’s private data, according to a new study. Researchers combined image scanning, cloud computing and public profiles from social networks to identify people in the offline world. The collected data even included social security numbers of some users!

3. Internet service providers.

Every Internet user obtains Internet access through an Internet service provider (ISP). All data transmitted to and from a user must pass through the ISP. Thus, an ISP has the potential to observe user’s activities on the Internet.

You never know, which information an ISP collects and what it does with that information. Beyond the usage of collected information typical of third parties, ISPs sometimes state that they will make their information available to government authorities upon request. In the US and other countries, such a request does not necessarily require a warrant.

An ISP cannot know the contents of properly-encrypted data, though. If you use our TorrentPrivacy VPN you can stop worrying about this one!

4. Search engines. Yes, they actually do have the ability to track a user’s searches. You can use Scroogle to get anonymized Google searches!

5. Social networks. This one is among the most dangerous, because many people are carelessly giving out their personal information in the social networks.

Social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, keep track of all interactions used on their sites and save them for later use. Issues include cyberstalking, location disclosure, social profiling, 3rd party personal information disclosure, and government information collection.

6. Malware includes viruses, trojan horses and other creepy stuff, that could not only damage your computer, but give the access to your any data to the 3-rd party. There’s also Spyware, that obtains information from a user’s computer without that user’s consent.

7. Phishing is trying to obtain sensitive information such as user names, passwords, credit card or bank information. Phishing is an internet crime in which some the thief pretends to be someform of electronic communication that you trust. For example, the page can look exactly like the Facebook log in page, but it can have a different web address (like facebok.com or facbook.com). If you enter your passowrd on it, it’ll be sent to the 3^rd party.

8. Social engineering is an acvitity, when someone pretends to be someone else and asks you for your data. The simplest example is when you get a message from the so-called  “Facebook support”, asking you for your password.

The dangers we listed are the most widespread. You can avoid every one of them, if you follow several simple rules, though!

Here they are:

1. Learn how to read online privacy policies
2. Opt-out and use any other privacy options offered
3. Get a separate account for your personal e-mail
4. Teach your kids not to give out personal information online without permission
5. Be careful when using social networking sites and picture/video sharing sites
6. Learn about – and use – the privacy features in your browser
7. Make sure that online transactions are secure
8. Learn how to spot phishing and other scams
9. Reject or delete unnecessary cookies
10. Use security software and promptly install security upgrades
11. Safeguard important files and communications
12. Use anonymizer tools, but cautiously
13. Use strong passwords and protect them
14. Use common sense

We hope you’ll be entirely protected! If you got anything to add – go ahead! Tell us about your privacy problems – we might know the perfect solution!

Have a safe day! ;]

Hi guys! This post begins our new section – “The Privacy Corner”.  In this section we’ll be talking about privacy on the Internet and about anything that can be possibly related to that.

We’ll start with a definition of privacy, proceeding with our thoughts on whether we need it at all… Before you go on, think of it yourself for a couple of seconds!

According to the Webster’s Dictionary, privacy is “freedom from unauthorized intrusion”.

We don’t want some stranger interfering our lives easily, thus we try not to disclose information about ourselves. On the Internet there are actually 2 types of this kind of information:

1) Personally Identifying Information (PII). It’s your name, age, age, physical address, your circle of friends and a range of other characteristics that could help to reveal your identity. Knowing your PII, someone can easily find you in the real world and do something to you (the worst key scenario).

2) Non-PII. It’s a secondary data, like your behavior on a website. The third-party can’t reveal your identity, but they can learn something important to them from what they see. And be sure they’ll somehow use it in the future…

It sounds kinda scary so far. But younger generations don’t think it is so.

Not a long time ago, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook, declared: “People have gotten really comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.” He said that lack of privacy as a “social norm” now.

From a psychological point of view it’s actually good. You have nothing to hide, you’re open to communication. You don’t wear a mask, honestly expressing your true desires and fears. Being in friendly environment you’ll live a happy life thanks to all of that.

On the other hand, you can get obsessed with your image. Lose a wonderful feeling of intimacy, becoming unable to ever feel love to the other person. This can happen, too…

Someone said: “The privacy is dead”. He meant exactly the positive side of lacking privacy (openness and so on). Now it doesn’t seem to be bad to many.

Now it looks like people do not try to achieve total anonymity. Because the revelation of IP addresses and other kinds of non-PII might become acceptable trade-offs for the convenience that users could otherwise. No one will quarrel that the targeted ads are better than random ones!

Nevertheless, some people desire much stronger privacy. In that case, they may try to achieve Internet anonymity to ensure privacy — use of the Internet without giving any third parties the ability to link the Internet activities to their personally-identifiable information (P.I.I.). That’s exactly the type of people, who use our TorrentPrivacy VPN and Bittorrent Anonymizer.

It’s not just businesses that collect your data. When you sign up for a new web service, you might assume that your data goes only as far as the company you’ve signed an agreement with. Reluctantly, it’s not so. Filing a simple FOIA request  revealed that government agencies like the DEA and even the IRS regularly collect, store, and request information from companies like Facebook and Twitter.

So, the government knows. And we don’t even mention some your Internet provider and the smart geek that lives next door…

Follow the link and see, how much info you give, just by visiting some random web-site:

http://analyze.privacy.net/Default.asp

What we’re trying to say is that individuals who use the Internet have to realize that they must play a role in protecting their own privacy.

So do you still have the same opinion you had before reading the post? Or maybe you even have something to add? We’d love to hear your feedback! We’ll answer your every comment!!

- Two levels of encryption: BitTorrent Protocol Encyption and SecureSHell Tunnel,

- Support of UDP trackers and magnet-links,

- Its own built in simple torrent client,

- Support of external torrent clients.