Identity Theft and your right to Privacy

In a shape of things to come and a follow on effect from Apple removing VPN apps from the App Store in China last week, Russia has just signed into a law a similar ban which takes effect on Nov 1. We expect this will spread to other countries very quickly. While there is no surprise that these non democratic countries do not value privacy, we are now seeing this leak into more democratic countries every day.

Recently, Australia has proposed laws forcing companies like Google and Apple to decrypt customer messages under the auspices of security. This follows Investigatory Powers Act recently passed by the British Parliament in November.

Most notable about these new regulations is that they claim they are designed to prevent the “bad guys” from doing bad things. The problem with this argument is that the bad guys will just use other mechanisms to communicate using other encryption technologies. It won’t take very long to adapt to these new regulations. What it does mean is that it will impact everyone else doing legitimate business around the world and simply aide foreign governments stealing corporate data and other legitimate secrets for commercial purposes.

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has also begun using Stingray devices to track cell phones and collect information from every cell phone that it sees. These devices masquerade as cell phone towers and effectively act as a man in the middle attack on devices, allowing anyone with such a device to monitor any activity on a phone.

Data loss prevention is one of the founding principals behind BlackFog and we will continue to protect corporations and individuals from this type of espionage and believe that every law abiding citizen has a fundamental right to privacy within a democracy.