It’s been revealed that the German ministry for home affairs (and thus the German police) are monitoring Skype, Google Mail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Facebook chat if deemed necessary.

Skype used to be secure, encrypting data before being sent across a P2P network. Now we see that some authorities have a way to eavesdrop.

So just keep in mind that if you value privacy you shouldn’t be using the networks shown above. It’s also a good time to remind you that SMSs are often recorded for the same reasons.

More details here.

Some people know what a cookie is, what it’s good for and how it can be abused. If you don’t here’s a very short summary:

• Cookies are codes that web sites save to your computer
• They’re used to help web sites remember who you are. E.g. when you log onto eBay and come back the next day, it remembers who you are.
• Marketing companies use them to keep track of how many of their ads you saw and where you might have seen them

So they’re not really a bad thing but marketing companies use them to track things about you. Then there are programs that try to delete them off your PC. Usually these programs are branded with words like “anti-spyware”, this isn’t completely accurate but that’s where you’ll see them. This is all fine so far.

And you can always delete cookies yourself. In Internet Explorer there’s an option in the Tools menu. All other browsers have similar options, usually in a tools or settings menu.

But there’s another kind of cookie that often gets overlooked – they’re called Flash cookies.

Unlike regular cookies, Flash cookies are not stored in your web browser’s settings. Deleting all privacy data leaves Flash cookies alone. Even deleting all cookie files off your drive skips Flash cookies.

Flash has a feature that lets web sites store a bit of information on your computer, just like a regular “cookie”. By itself this is harmless, but some developers have taken advantage of its features and use them to track you just like regular cookies. This by itself could be seen as a minor annoyance, it’s not dangerous.

But it’s also possible for a web site to restore a cookie that you deleted. Now this is a misuse of privacy. You see, when you tell your computer to delete all privacy data, and it later reappears, things are happening against your will – this is morally bad. The way they do it is developers create some code that uses Flash to store a copy of a cookie and if the cookie is gone it rewrites it.

What can you do about it?

On Windows you can install “Better Privacy” or “Ccleaner”.

On Mac OS X you can install “Flush.app” or delete the Flash cookie files the hard way.

There’s also a great deal more information in this article.

It’s now up to Adobe (the company that makes Flash) and web browsers to treat this as a privacy bug and to improve their browsers.

Phones have become quite sophisticated devices recently, hence the term “smartphone”. They can connect to the internet, download programs, and keep track of your life. All useful features.

Phones can also be used to spy on you, as some people in United Arab Emirates discovered. In this case a network carrier (Etisalat) sent their customers an update that installs on their BlackBerry phones. They told their customers that the update was “required for service enhancements.”

What they didn’t tell their customers is that the update contains spyware made by a company called SS8 Networks. This spyware sent information to their company using the phone (which incidentally drained their batteries from uploading so much data).

It’s still unclear what this spyware actually does, or why it was installed on their customers’ phones. You can read more information on this incident here.

In theory phone spyware could activate the phone’s microphone and/or camera and send information to another site. Or it could intercept SMS’s and phone calls. And so many phones these days also GPS receivers in them so spyware could also theoretically keep track of your location. This is all scary stuff.

There isn’t much we can do about this threat at the moment, if your life or work involves privacy then consider using an old phone with limited features instead of today’s smartphones.

When you visit a web site then later visit another web site, your web browser keeps a history of these sites. You can see this history by going to your browser’s menu and clicking on History.

In the past this history was private because it exists only on your PC. But recently it’s been proven that it’s possible for web sites to get a peek into your browser history. This could be a privacy concern for some people. Here’s how it works.

Some people have come up with some clever code they can place on their site. It basically asks your browser if you’ve visited a particular site before. For a demonstration click here and click on the Get Started link in the centre. Don’t worry, nothing bad will happen, it’s just a demonstration.

So how does this affect you?

You just need to be aware that privacy on the internet is fairly limited these days. If you have something to hide (for whatever reason) or you’d just like a bit more privacy, there are steps you can take to prevent this. It’s a bit technical for beginners but with a bit of effort it’s achievable.

• Some browsers now have a “privacy” mode. For example, Google Chrome calls it “incognito”. Privacy mode doesn’t keep track of which sites you’ve been to.
• You can use Firefox and install something called the “NoScript addon”. This will block the code I mentioned above.