Citadel of the Blogs The Inbox of the Internet (really)

Spockis the self-proclaimed leader in personal search, helping users find and discover people. See this review via Search 2.0

This makes me wonder whether the future of search engines lies in niche-searching, e.g. Spock for people, Google for keywords, another search engine for searching business websites for products, etc.

This strikes me as a more realistic approach to organizing information on the web than a “one size fits all” search.

That said, I am staring to find software for utilizing the semantic web! I’m excited to see this but have yet to explore it more fully. Will post more when I’ve had a chance to test drive it.

One way to shorten search time on the web is by limiting your search to a specific domain. Let’s say you want to search pages only from Canada. What do you do? You could go to Google’s homepage and click the appropriate radiobutton. You could use Google’s “Advanced Search”. Or you could do it directly in your search using Google’s site operator. Simple type “site:.ca”—without the quotes but with the colon—followed by your keywords. Voila! Google points you to only those pages with .ca in their domain.

This is a good way to search across classifieds (e.g. guelph.kijiji.ca, toronto.craigslist.org); American educational institutions (.edu); government websites (e.g. gov.on.ca); or combined with the quote operator you can get pretty specific results in a newspaper site, for example, “axis of evil” site:www.nytimes.com. In fact, you may prefer using a Google site search to a website’s own search box based on the results you get. But I’d recommend comparing both searches rather than always relying on one or the other. Sometimes I like, for example, Statistics Canada’s search box; and sometimes I like searching globally across the statcan.ca domain using the site operator.

Remember, when Google doesn’t work, most people don’t have a Plan B. Librarians have lots of Plan B’s. They know when to go to a book, when to call someone, even when to go to Google. Visit www.lib.uoguelph.ca/help/ask.htm for more information.

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of travellers who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

via FourthAmendment.com

In August, I read a good journalist’s article on businesses that print full credit card numbers on receipts. At the time, I hadn’t realized how widespread this was until I started checking every receipt closely. Now it is starting to make me angry.

On Tuesday, I went to a regulatory conference where the privacy officer for TD Bank was presenting. I asked her about merchants who print full credit card numbers on receipts. She informed me that Visa has a requirement to only print last few digits of credit card on receipts and it came into effect on April 1, 2007 of this year. However, this new rule is not well known and not enforced and it seems customers have to police it on their own. In fact, she seemed to think we could expect merchants to take 3 to 7 years to “get it right”. With 500,000 terminals in use in Canada alone, I don’t doubt her point. I just take issue with the process.

So I have gotten into the habit of crossing out the middle six numbers on their store copy of the receipt (since I keep my own and am careful with it). Other than that, cardholders can call the Visa card issuer with information about the merchant’s name, location and the date. Or customers can call the federal Privacy Commissioner at 1-800-282-1376 or send an email to info@privcom.gc.ca.

Incidentally, MasterCard made a similar mandate in Canada back on April 1, 2005. At that time, cardholder receipts generated by newly installed, replaced or relocated terminals were required to block all but the last four digits of the account number.

For further info, read this letter from the Ontario Privacy Commissioner.

At first, it appeared that Shopper’s Drug Mart printed full credit card numbers. I need to double-check my receipts because I dug into this more deeply and they are supposedly substituting four digits with four zeroes rather than the more customary asterisks. Due to complaints they are supposedly changing to asterisks in October, 2007. [UPDATE Sep 23/07: zeroes in it! I’m quite relieved to know Shoppers did this. And not only do I support their explanation that it is hard to distinguish zeroes from the rest of your credit card number and their decision to move toward asterisks– I now have more respect for them for doing this. That is how privacy can build confidence in a business!]

But the one that really got me on to this was when I registered my son for swimming lessons at the YMCA. A big company like that should not be printing full credit card numbers. No way, no how.

I read about the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic’s (CIPPIC) concerns with Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology and privacy but didn’t make the connection until I read this article in the Globe: if you download music from Apple’s iTunes they are watching you!! (Did that get your attention too? lol)

It is hard to straighten out the facts from the privacy-fiction but, according to CIPPIC’s media release, DRM technologies don’t sufficiently inform users that they are tracking usage and surfing habits — and, more sinisterly, CIPPIC observed “unexplained communications with third parties including marketing
companies.”

UPDATE sept 27/07:
little more for you:
One example described in the report is Intuit’s QuickTax software. According to the CIPPIC, the DRM platform in QuickTax causes it to send Canadian residents’ information to US officials, and there is no disclosure about that up front.