So here’s the list of Prepaid Credit Cards I will be investigating and detailing the conditions and requirements:

• GreenDot
• WebSecret
• Vanilla Visa
• Privacash
• All-Access Gift Card

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• Simon Gift Card

If anyone can think of anymore I should review, please let me know. Reviews on the above cards coming in January. I’m afraid however the news won’t be good. Most cards all appear to be checking for SSN’s and verifying them due to the Patriot Act.

I’ll keep you posted.

This video correlates to my post earlier this month about how Facebook and MySpace are privacy nightmares. This video sheds light on a different privacy concern however. In my earlier post I was discussing the threats that normal people could pose by using information from the two social networking sites. Now we’re faced with the very possible potential that Facebook has a direct relationship with the federal government and that it may even be involved as a source of data mining for the government. During the past couple years it’s been publicized that these data mining and surveillance programs do exist. Look at the AT&T and NSA story. The Bush wiretapping and surveillance project. No longer does the Facebook/Government relationship seem like just a conspiracy theory.

In my own personal opinion, you are a moron if you put as much information on these websites as is possible. Facebook goes as far as to ask you for everything from movies interests, job history, hometown, phone numbers, email, clubs, sexual orientation, etc. Again, this is why I don’t have an account on either site. I’m not a glutton for attention. I don’t have to have it and I’m sure not going to publish all my personal information for everyone to see.

Another aspect some people haven’t embraced is the fact that employers are starting to use these two sites to screen potential employees. Your next job could be lost or gained based on your Myspace and Facebook profiles. Scary? You bet. Law enforcement has even begun to use these two sites as sources of information, clues, and leads in ongoing investigations and potential threats. Think back to 2006 and the number of school “threats” that were circumvented due to the moron posting his plan and ideas on his Myspace page.

Watch the video, and tell me what you think. Facebook and the Government, not as far fetched as one might hope.

Are you reading this? Britain is installing cameras that will talk to you and give you commands and instruct you to not litter, tell you where the trash can is, tell you to stop fighting, or even ask you to move along instead of loitering around. This is ridiculous.

I’m past the privacy implications of this technology as the UK is the poster-child for a police state and surveillance society. They already have over 4.2 million CCTV cameras across the county. What’s interesting is even some of the citizens don’t see the cameras as a good solution and have phrased this new approach as possible “scarecrow” policing. A quote from one citizen:

“Whether this is moving down a track of almost ‘scarecrow’ policing rather than real policing – actually insuring that we have more bobbies on the beat – I think that’s what we really want to see, albeit that an initiative like this may be an effective tool in certain circumstances.”

Think of all the logistical nightmares this could produce. I can only imagine a number of teenagers who are going to screw this system by pretending to litter, or mock-fighting just so they can elicit a response from the talking camera. I think in my high school days I definitely would’ve done that. However, I’m sure there will be a law against that and then the camera will ask you to stop mocking it and to move along. Anyway, I thought it was a funny story.

Some of you may be looking at me and saying to yourself “Google keeps my search data?” Yeah they do. They track the search query, the IP address requesting the information (that’s your IP address), and other details from the cookie they put on your computer. This isn’t an underhanded deceitful source of trickery on Google’s part, it’s been widely known for years that Google keeps this data. The good news is that now it will be anonymized after 18-24 months by changing a few bits in the IP address so that the query can no longer be matched back to the requester.

While I would really like it if they just wouldn’t keep the data at all, Google states they need this data to continue gathering statistics and other business related data for its revenue generation. Google has stated they are seeking the proper balance between privacy and business necessity. So we’ll see; like I said earlier, it’s a step.

For you criminals out there, let it be known that law enforcement can still request that log data be held for a certain IP address or addresses, so technically, if you are being watched or monitored, then your IP address and the search terms associated, may be retained indefinitely.

If anyone is interested in truly private Google searching, and by that I mean no cookies, no IP addresses and no audit trail, just head on over to Scroogle. This is a “scraper” that proxies your search requests and returns just the results, no ads and in complete anonymity.

There’s been a number of people over the years that have looked into this already, so I won’t have to totally reinvent the wheel.  There are also a few good writeups on the web about how to build your own card reader and instructions on how to get that data into your PC.  One of those sites is by Billy Hoffman of SPI Dynamics.  A few years ago he wrote a suite of tools called Stripe Snoop that can read and import data from mag stripes.

There is also another gentleman by the name of Abend who did a presentation at ShmooCon 2006 about mag-stripe reading.  You can find his presentation and video here.   You can find his code here.

All that to say I’ve got a reader I picked up off eBay and I’m going to start gathering all the necessary parts to put together a reader I can hook up to my computer.  Then hopefully between Stripe Snoop, abend’s code, and some other sites, I’ll be able to get started researching.  I’ll post updates on my project here.