Hot answers tagged privacy
71
Summary
Minimising the attack vectors by not registering a domain, not registering hosting, not using a credit card, not openly giving out your IP and email address, not using Google Analytics, and not blabbing about your new project will each reduce the chance of your identity being discovered.
How might your identity be discovered?
To understand how to ...
14
The Whois privacy is barely a protection - most registrars will surrender your personal details at the first request. Well, perhaps at the second. Anyway, the point is, they are generally unwilling to take risk and get under fire so they won't bother to investigate who is right and who is wrong for a client that perhaps only brings $5/month of revenues.
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10
It's potentially illegal and also morally wrong.
Basically, if you would be unhappy for someone to read your private messages then it's wrong (morally) and I suspect it would be considered criminal under one of these Canadian Laws (technically the crime would be committed at the location of the server):-
Section 342 of the Criminal Code of Canada ...
8
Without additional safety, no. Random URLs are crawled all the time. However, this is good when done with a sign-on page to authenticate the user.
An intermediate solution is to make sure the status page contains no personal data, only general info. For example, 'PAID BY CC' rather than 'PAID by VISA 1234567891' and 'Shipped' instead of 'Shipped to John ...
4
The first step to protecting your anonymity on the internet is to decide what level of security you need. Are you concerned with hiding from well funded governments / political parties, or just the average Joe?
The Average Joe
If it's the latter, entering invalid whois data (don't pay for any of the supposed "privacy guard" services, they're just changing ...
3
Use a Hidden Service on the Tor-network with a .onion-domain. Unless you give out personal details yourself, it's impossible to trace back to you.
3
No, Adsense does not send the content of every page to Google - that would be pretty inefficient and hog a lot of bandwidth - and in fact is not technically possible with cross-domain restrictions.
Instead, the Adsense crawler (different from the normal Googlebot crawler) visits the page separately and decides what the context of the page is. Then when a ...
3
This is a good question but I would have to agree with Pekka. Perhaps you may not realize the consequences of doing so. For example say you visit one of the many many sites that use jQuery from the Google CDN. If this site just happens to not be coded in manner that makes it gracefully degrade (ie. bad coding standards) then you may be stuck on the home page ...
3
I can't really answer the question of what information would be missed, though I will say from an analytics standpoint we do tend to care about the browser and OS our users are visiting with (to determine what HTML features we can get away with using).
Philosophically I can give you my view on the sitiation--
What CAN be done falls in to two categories:
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3
Technically your question is one of international law.
But I think that's stretching the technicality well past absurdity for a public forum such as this.
My answer is from a more practical "what should the IT folks do until the lawyers and judges figure all this out?" point of view.
The answer is do nothing until you see the BIG players responding and ...
3
Don't confuse the words Anonymous and Track-able
Any form of communication can be traced and extends further than the use of Google Analytics, you are miss understanding what they refer to 'anonymously'. What they are implying is that the data you input or provide will not be shared to the public nor will they ask for your name.
Making a telephone call is ...
3
Using Google Analytics is not unethical
Google Analytics does not track Google accounts. GA uses a special set of cookies _ga, __utma, __utmb, __utmv and __utmz to track user activity. And Google Analytics does not allow individual users to be "traced" any more than they would otherwise without GA present.
Perfect privacy on the web is impossible
Whether ...
2
You could try http://www.whoisguard.com/ -- they say they offer whois privacy protection for 'existing domains' (i.e. without having to transfer them to a different registrar), which sounds like what you're after.
If it were me, though, I'd just transfer the domain to someone who offers whois protection for free as part of the service (like namecheap), or ...
2
From this cross-post:
To change or remove this notice you need to amend the following Template files:
create.html.tmpl located in \template\en\default\account\
request-new.txt.tmpl located in \template\en\default\account\email\
2
What kind of information can websites collect about someone (someone's computer or device) when they visit your website?
I know we log IP's, and can determine your zipcode, OS, browser type and native language but what else?
Off the top of my head -
Your IP.
From your IP, location information, sometimes down to city level, sometimes not. ...
2
If it's a simple denial of service attack DoS (from a small number of computers) you should report it to the authorities, as they have the means to track the sources, and if possible, identify them and bring them to court. I do not recommend amateur detective work to track attackers. We pay taxes for a reason.
To solve the DoS temporarily, the ISP provider ...
2
The age-old standard for managing robots is /robots.txt. robots.txt asks robots not to crawl or index certain pages on your site. Your specific question seems to relate more to the Robots <META> tag, which belongs in the <head> of your document, and cannot be specified within a <div> tag somewhere in the body of your page.
As it is, your ...
2
One main thing is going to be disable or limit access logging. You would have to configure your Web server not to log any user's IP addresses.
Also ensure access is not logged elsewhere in the system or the data center, no external applicances like reverse proxies are active, and so on.
Also as @JonahBron points out, don't use sessions. Best don't serve ...
2
The whole point of DNS is to make this information to other computers, so I can't think of anything that you wouldn't want to make public.
You can see what can already be found out about your domain using this tool.
2
Depending on where you live there may be local privacy laws which say what you can and can't collect. However it's always best to tell people what you're going to do.
The usage information you collect depends on what your aims for the site are. You should collect information which tells you how you're achieving that aim. So for example, if you want people ...
2
"Bad" is a somewhat subjective and relative term. But if you want to adhere to best practices regarding respecting user privacy, then, in addition to KoKo's answer, you can simply track the data for the minimum amount of time needed to do what you need to do, and then discard or anonymize it afterwards. This is what Google and most other major online ...
2
There is a blogger, writer and scientist in the UK who went by the nom de plume of Belle de Jour - because she wrote about being a practicing prostitute. She wrote a book (and some more later) and her book was made into two TV series. She remained completely anonymous for a very long time before she was outed.
The way she did it is detailed here.
The ...
2
I would not go with a 404 page. A 404 page is not just page, but also a response. It lets the client know that the page was not found. That it was somehow deleted or the url is wrong.
If you are using some sort of session to hide information that is availabe only to logged in users, then you can use your server side scripting language of choice, (asp, ...
2
If your campaigns are merely controversial you should be fine as it would be exceedingly hard to determine the owner of a S3 account merely from the URL (assuming, of course, you don't do something completely moronic like use your full name for the bucket). You may also want to make sure that neither your username/email address associated with the account ...
2
The laws and acts that governs data protection and emailing various from country to country, while a lot of them change from country to country most say among the same thing and you will need to learn the key points of these and its far to many to list but for example. Not keeping peoples data on file for more than 2 years, you are responsible for safe ...
2
The dot PRO domain names have tighter rules compared to the likes of .com, .org, .net. currently and most likely indefinite you can not use private whois information on any PRO domain names from any Registrars. This is set by Afilias and makes sense because entities are validated by government certification which is periodically checked against whois data. I ...
1
It depends on the new maintainer. When you authorize the transfer to the new maintainer and the maintainer keeps in charge the domain, it has to provide contact details for the domain.
You just need to make sure you purchased the Privacy option and make sure the new maintainer will send the protected contact details.
You might want to contact the new ...
1
Godaddy can accept transfers and keep them private
http://www.godaddy.com/domainaddon/private-registration.aspx
Private Registration works with new, existing, transferred or backordered domains!
1
You can tell google to disable the search history for those accounts, you can also use the disconnect plugin in your browser, which is designed to stop some of that snooping - no idea if it will stop google logging your search history for a logged in account but its worth a look.
1
I don't really have the same security issue, but I'm often logged into two accounts at the same time: My personal account with G+, AdWords, Analytics etc, and my AdWords MCC account (which requires a separate Google Account). My solution to the problem is to use two different browsers: I use Firefox and Chrome; the sessions are separated so shouldn't get ...
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