FBI now spying on your garbage

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JNN 18 Dec 2010 : Former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents are helping local authorities turn thousands of garbage collectors into a spy force that reports to the police.

Reports say 100 Waste Management employees have already gone through a training program called Waste Watch, CBS 6 Albany/WRGB reported on Friday.

“Because our job is collecting trash from local neighborhoods and businesses, we are a useful resource to identify illegal activity, or to help prevent a minor mishap from turning into a dangerous situation,” said Ken Bevis, district manager of Waste Management in Albany, New York.

Bevis added that all Waste Management drivers, helpers, and repair technicians have been trained to look out for suspicious activities and respond in the event of an emergency.

Officials believe that garbage collectors who go through the same route every day are able to recognize situations that are not normal.

Police hope that they will be able to help keep streets clear of crime as well. But not everyone is sold on the idea.

Waste Watch is already active in 100 communities across the United States. The total figure of informants could already number at least 10,000 nationwide.

Critics say the program is an example of how the United States is turning into an East German-style informant society.

 

Majority of Apps spy on users

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JNN 18 Dec 2010 : An investigation into smartphone applications has revealed that most the Apps are designed to spy on people, transmitting personal data of device owners to different companies.

According to The Wall Street Journal‘s investigation, 56 of the 101 widely used Apps — including software and games for iPhone and Android phones — transferred the personal details of their users to advertising companies without the consent of users.

Various companies benefit from the personal information in different ways, ranging from finding the users address to their interests and software they use the most.

Forty-seven of these applications transmitted the location of the phone, whereas age, gender and other personal information were sent by five of the Apps. The unique ID number assigned to each phone by the manufacturers was the most widely shared detail.

iPhone sends out more information compared with Androids which typically use Google operating systems, the study found.

TextPlus 4 (iPhone App for text messaging), Pandora (a music App in both iPhone and Android), and Paper Toss (a game in both iPhone and Android) were the applications sharing the most data. The manufacturers of TextPlus 4 and Pandora; however, deny the claim, saying that the Apps share data anonymously and the personal profile, including age and gender, is transferred voluntarily.

Apple, similarly, says iPhone Apps “cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user’s prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used.”

The manufacturers of Smart Phones running Google’s Android operating systems, such as Motorola Inc, Samsung Electronics Co and Google, say the responsibility of handling with user’s information rests with the App-makers. If users do not like a particular application to have access to their data, they can simply choose not to install the app, Google says.

While computer users can block or delete tiny tracking files (cookies), smartphone users are completely powerless in this regard.

“In the world of mobile, there is no anonymity,” says Michael Becker of the Mobile Marketing Association, stressing that a cell phone is “always with us. It’s always on.”