Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

702 Sydney – Green computing and how we’re being watched online

radio talkback & discussion on technology, the web and social media

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Paul Wallbank

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This morning on 702 Sydney I’m talking to Linda Mottram about Internet spying and green computing.

How Green is the internet looks at the claims from Google and other companies about cloud computing’s energy use.

The Internet snooping story broke two weeks ago with The Guardian NSA files.

An early part of the story was abot the use of the telephone company metadata – information about phone calls, not the actual content which intelligence agencies and law enforcement can use to draw a picture from.

For Australians, there’s additional cause for concern as the Telecommunications Act gives government agencies the powers to access anyone’s information.

If you’re worried about the way data is being collected about you online. Duck Duck Go is a secure, private browser and Box Free IT has some great suggestions on securing cloud computing services.

For those who want to seriously cover their online tracks, the Tor project and PGP encryption are more advanced privacy tools.

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 222 702 or post a question on ABC702 Sydney’s Facebook page.

If you’re a social media users, you can also follow the show through twitter to @paulwallbank and @702Sydney.

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One response to “702 Sydney – Green computing and how we’re being watched online”

  1. Rohit Thomas

    NOTHING IS SECURE AND NOTHING HAS BEEN SECURE FOR 30 ODD YEARS. 1 thing that Australia and Australians have been a failure-technology (innovations too, let alone low cost innovations or blue ocean strategies IN COMPARISON TO THE WORLD). So, that’s a domain or domains where it needs to improve.

    HOW HASN’T TECH BEEN SECURE FOR 30 ODD YEARS? In the last 30 years, nothing has been private as the following video would show – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KYbaxmYlkg (THE SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY: 1984 CAME 25 YEARS LATE) (IN US, it’s been there since 1950s atleast, rest of the world similar and one article to show that – http://civilliberty.about.com/od/waronterror/tp/Surveillance-History.htm).

    In addition, technology firms are not the only ones that have privacy issues (Think the government has data on you? Big corporations already won that game! See the full infographic: http://bit.ly/122NzGV
    ). Marketing, financial, government, health, education and all other industries have such issues as behavioural tracking has gone from tracking behavioural patterns to checking of personal data since it’s worth trillions of $. It has been made easier by the Internet and various devices that one uses these days. A source for this is the video ‘Tracking the Trackers’ where Mozilla CEO Gary shows that not only his browsing and emails have been tracked but also that of his daughter’s (http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_kovacs_tracking_the_trackers.html).

    Furthermore, directories, search engines and heat-maps are also used for tracking. Wink is one such people search engine which combines various social networks, search engines, apps and the web to find information. On the other hand, heatmaps tell the website owners where on a page people have clicked, how far down a page people scroll, which part of a page a person is looking at and so on.

    Thus, an individual should not publish their personal details on a database itself as these days, databases are linked online through any device (http://theinstitute.ieee.org/technology-focus/technology-topic/the-next-evolution-of-the-internet). Also, they should change their settings from the default ones whether it’s for email, social networks/media or any other app.

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