Here’s a new challenge to your privacy which is not easy to overcome. It’s a new system being promoted for bank security purposes by a company called The 41st, which takes an online “fingerprint” of your computer. And using secure VPN such as Cryptohippie does not eliminate this threat.

It works like this. An online bank installs third party software on their computer which tracks all your logins. They take information which your browser reveals about your computer: things like your language, your timezone, the version of your browser, plug-ins like Javascript that you may have installed…. they claim to gather around 40 factors like this. Taken together, they make your PC pretty much unique.

So far so good and of course this does have a legitimate use. Its intention is to catch malicious hackers. If one PC with that unique connection of 40 factors is logging in to lots of different accounts, it may be a sign of hacking activity and the bank would then block access to those accounts automatically.

The dangerous thing is that we have seen that the fingerprint is being retained in some cases on a central server, which could be shared between banks. And it’s not just banks using this system, either… its other online financial services companies like credit card issuers, merchant account providers and so on.

Now let’s say you are careful to log in to your home, public passthrough bank account from your home IP address, then you run your VPN on your laptop and log in from another IP address to a completely different bank, which you might want to keep secret for very legitimate reasons. Although you’ve changed your IP address, if this technology is installed at both banks, they would be able to link the two accounts because you logged in from the same PC.

Worse still, would be if you had two accounts in the same bank that the bank doesn’t know are linked, and you want to keep it that way.

Solutions to this problem? Cryptohippie says:

It is a privacy issue that the web browser has. So, it is somewhere between “very hard”, “impossible” and “destroying your application” if we would filter it. Since the issue is your web browser and your javascript a local javascript filter/patch (noscript for example) could help more.

by Peter Macfarlane for Q Wealth Report

News just in from the British no2id.net newsletter about a seriers of data leaks (six million Chileans are the latest victims) got me thinking about something else I read a few weeks back over at Vera Verba. Sean Hastings, co-author of ‘God Wants You Dead’, wrote:

A lot of the people that I tend to socialize with are libertarian types with strong feelings about freedom and privacy. I have always been very pro-freedom, but am skeptical about the need for privacy.

You can read the full article here. Meanwhile here is the news from no2id:

The personal data of six million Chileans were stolen at the beginning
of May and briefly published on a website. They included names, e-mail
addresses and street addresses. A hacker said he stole them online from
the health ministry, the electoral authority and the state-run phone
company. Not to be outdone, the highly official website of the Swiss
Justice and Police Ministry has just published a confidential document
about Europe’s Schengen immigration control arrangements. But it was all
a “mistake” a ministry spokesman said — prompting some Swiss to wonder
what the ministry might get up to with even more important data, namely
theirs. Next door, the German government has admitted that 189 desktop
computers, 328 laptops, 38 data storage devices and 271 mobile phones
belonging to the federal authorities went missing between 2005 and 2007.
48 of them disappeared outside Germany. Some contained sensitive or
secret data.

This of course comes hot on the heals of followup from Italy, regarding the brief publication of all Italian tax returns on the internet. Although the Italian government quickly removed the site, The Economist reports that the data is now being offered on Ebay.

So, should we be prepared to give up our privacy, to keep our freedom… as western governments are so keen on persuading us? Do we need to be under constant surveillance so the government can keep us safe? Not on your life! I am making a conscious effort to escape the matrix by refusing to provide personal data unless absolutely necessary.

Credit bureaux are somethe worst offenders, as I wrote recently in The Q Practical Offshore Banking Guide 2008 which is available for free download now to all Q Wealth Members. Fact is, nobody even bothers to write about data leaks from credit bureaux because private financial data is leaking out every minute of every day in quite a routine manner.

At Q Wealth we always focus on practical solutions. There is one solution to the credit bureaux data leak problem – and that is to use only offshore bank accounts and credit cards. Offshore banks do not file these horrible credit bureaux reports.

If you need any advice on offshore bank account opening, you are in the right place. Check out the Q Wealth Report and also my personal offshore banking blog over at www.petermacfarlane.net

P.S. The info on our next Recipes for Success event in Panama is now up on the site at www.qwealthevents.com Come join us there. More in a later blog entry. You can reserve your space today.

BBC News reports outrage in tax-shy Italy after the outgoing government published every Italian’s declared earnings and tax contributions on their website!

The information was published with no warning for nearly 24 hours. It was later removed after a formal complaint from the country’s privacy watchdog.

The finance ministry described the move as a bid to improve transparency. Deputy Economic Minister Vincenzo Visco is quoted as saying ”he could not understand what all the fuss was about.”

This is Peter Macfarlane for the Q Wealth Report. I’m writing this from the airport, just leaving Cancun, Mexico… where a small but select group of investors gathered for the first Q Wealth Events “Recipes for Success” retreat.

The event was great fun, taking place in a top spa hotel with great food. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and the hotel’s service could not have beeen better! We had a diverse group of couple and singles from different countries and backgrounds… but the one thing they had in common was a desire to protect their privacy, and increase their wealth and well being. Everyone here was already well versed in basic offshore and PT theory, so the presenters moved swiftly to a higher level and some very interesting discussions resulted. We are even planning some group trips in South America later this year!

Anyway, the next Recipes for Success event will be in Panama City, Panama in the first week of November. Keep it free in your diary! We already have some signups. Details of the event should be up on the site of Q Wealth Events (www.qwealthevents.com) within the next couple of weeks, but if you would like to put your name down ahead of time, please email the Q WEalth office. I’m looking forward to meeting you there!

Original source: http://www.petermacfarlane.net/2008/05/10/live-from-cancun-recipes-for-success-2008/

One in four people being added to the UK’s huge national DNA database is a child. Do you think this is right? Not much shocks us at Q Wealth, but playing with kids’ DNA still shocks us. Not to mention that we are researching zan article right now on forced adoptions in the UK, where perfectly kids are forcibly removed from perfectly health parents… but more on that later. Watch this space.

According to Christopher Hope of The Telegraph, this “figure provides further evidence that the Government’s “Big Brother” national database is increasingly targeting young people before they are old enough to vote.”

The news has prompted concerns from civil liberties campaigners that Britain is a “surveillance state”. Wow, at Q Wealth we would never have figured that !!!

Liberal Democrat Justice spokesman Jenny Willott is quoted as saying:

There is something horribly Big Brotherish about a society that is adding over 5,000 kids a month to a DNA database when they’re not even old enough to get a National Insurance Number.

To read the full text of The Telegraph’s article, go here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/07/ncrime207.xml

An article just published by Egan Orion in “The Inquirer” reveals a:

Secret pact allows the US to spy on UK motorists

The British Home Secretary secretively signed a “special certificate” last year that gives foreign security agencies real-time access to traffic camera images and related data monitoring British motorists on highways throughout the UK.

Opposition politicians and civil liberties advocates yesterday accused Gordon Brown’s government of attempting to hide from Parliament its covert plans to facilitate international surveillance of UK citizens in violation of privacy laws.

Under the authorisation signed last July 4 by Jacqui Smith, video feeds and still images captured from roadside TV cameras, along with personal data derived from them, can be transmitted out of the UK to countries such as the US, that are outside the European Economic Area.

If you would like to read the full story, it is at:

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/04/21/quiet-pact-allows-spy-uk

In the latest of a series of examples of lack of care of personal data by governments and the private sector, British banking giant HSBC has admitted losing a computer disc with the details of 370,000 customers, according to a BBC News report.

The disc was lost in March after being sent by courier from the bank’s life insurance offices in Southampton, to a reinsurer’s office in Folkestone, Kent.

As well as name, date of birth and value of the insurance cover held by each customer, the disc also apparently revealed the customer’s policy number and whether or nor the customer was a smoker.

Despite the reassurances from HSBC, it admitted that although the data on the disc had not been encrypted, just controlled with simple password access which is easily bypassed.

“We hold up our hands and say it wasn’t good enough,” the bank’s spokesman is quoted as saying. “The documents should have been encrypted.”

“The HSBC incident is just the latest example of careless behaviour by a big organisation regarding personal information.” says the BBC article, which goes on to quote other examples from recent news:

• A laptop computer with the personal details of more than 200 children was stolen from a medical centre in Shropshire.
• The Courts Service lost four CDs in the post with personal details from court cases.
• Information about nearly 600,000 people went missing when a Royal Navy officer had his laptop stolen from a car in Birmingham.
• Hundreds of documents from the Department of Work and Pensions containing sensitive personal data were found dumped on a roundabout in Devon.
• Nine NHS trusts in England admitted losing patient records covering hundreds of thousands of adults.
• 14,000 customer records were lost by the Skipton building society.
• Ministers revealed in December that, earlier in 2007, details of three million candidates for the British driving theory test had gone missing while being processed… in the USA!

“Organisations which process personal information must ensure it is held securely. This is an important principle of the Data Protection Act,” said the office of the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/business/7334249.stm