Mash-ups and how your privacy may be lost again
Get the latest postings first, save yourself time thanks to our e-mail service. It’s much more convenient
Recently we pointed out on your Wincurity blog that Web 2.0 is offering us new opportunities but also possible threats. A new fad with Web 2.0 is the ever greater use of so-called mash-up sites (What are mash-ups?).
The worry is that mashups could be an accident waiting to happen. Central to the problem is the fact that neither the mashup developer owns data being mashed, nor does the owner know about her data being used.
In turn, a hacker could feed false data to a crime location mashup, for example, perhaps to help raise property prices in a particular area by making it appear crime-free. A prankster could create bogus traffic jams on a mashup map, diverting traffic in such a way that queues are actually made worse.
Privacy is a particularly worrying issue because mashup sites have no clear rules on what they can and cannot do with people’s details. To demonstrate how easily mashups can combine information in a way that invades people’s privacy, one may mash book wishlists posted by Amazon users with Google Maps. The wishlists often contain the user’s full name, as well as the city and state in which they live - enough information to find their full street address from a search site such as Yahoo People Search.
All this is enough to get a satellite image of a user’s home from Google Maps. Hence, one individual went out and produced such a map in order to demonstrate who dangerous it all is. The map showed the location of people who liked to read “subversive” books.
- - What Amazon and Google can do - we know what subversive literature you like - are you a terrorist?
Watch out for the next story that will tell you a bit about how mas-ups can make the virus threat an even bigger issue.
amazon, google, Google Maps, hacker, mash ups, privacy, subversive, subversive books, terrorist, trend, Web 2.0