What info does Zero Knowledge collect on users of Freedom 3.0?
----- Forwarded message from Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> -----
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this a moot point ? I was under the impression that ZKS was going to pull the plug sometime in the very near future. ----- John Kozubik - john@kozubik.com - http://www.kozubik.com On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote:
----- Forwarded message from Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> -----
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: What info does Zero Knowledge collect on users of Freedom 3.0? To: politech@politechbot.com Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 01:41:09 -0700
[I agreed to delete Anonymous' name before posting, but it is fair to point out that Anonymous works for a company that is in some areas a competitor to ZKS. I offered ZKS the opportunity to reply; their response follows. My own thoughts: If ZKS wants to display tailored ads, it makes sense that Freedom clients will communicate with the mother ship on a more-or-less regular basis. This is what Eudora and Opera do, and what Freedom 3.0 apparently does (I haven't used it). The question is whether users are aware of the potential privacy risks. --Declan]
They're pulling the plug on the Freedom anon-network. They're now using the name Freedom 3.0 to refer to a different, new product that does stuff like cookie blocking. -Declan At 11:18 PM 10/18/01 -0700, John Kozubik wrote:
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this a moot point ? I was under the impression that ZKS was going to pull the plug sometime in the very near future.
Let me try give some more details behind this. The idea was to create separate modules that can be separately shipped and sold. Freedom 3.0 "privacy & security tools" is the first of those. It has a subset of the functions in freedom 2.2 (cookie management etc), but some of those functions have new features or have been improved. Declan's interivew with Austin and Ian's comments on slashdot and here cover the aspect of the story that the current freedom network which was the support infrastructure behind the anonymous browsing and mail part of Freedom 2.2 was decomissioned. Other consumer software related plans are not public. Adam On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 02:36:00AM -0700, Declan McCullagh wrote:
They're pulling the plug on the Freedom anon-network. They're now using the name Freedom 3.0 to refer to a different, new product that does stuff like cookie blocking.
-Declan
At 11:18 PM 10/18/01 -0700, John Kozubik wrote:
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this a moot point ? I was under the impression that ZKS was going to pull the plug sometime in the very near future.
On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote:
[I agreed to delete Anonymous' name before posting, but it is fair to point out that Anonymous works for a company that is in some areas a competitor to ZKS.
[snip]
This would also include any cookies set from zeroknowledge.com, (which ZKS sets every time you go there), but I filter cookies through the MEconomy system, so I had none from them.
[snip] Hhmm. Anonymous doesn't work for MEconomy by any chance, does he? -MW-
On 19 Oct 2001, Declan McCullagh quoted a non-so-Anonymous source:
And, of course, there's the fact that Freedom notifies everyone between my computer and zeroknowledge.com that I'm using freedom. Which, of course, is covered by the Pen trace and trap warrants, and is collected by carnivore. Now I'm telling my ISP and the world what my IP is, what my platform is, and that I use Freedom.
How, again, is this not tracking me?
I suppose that my question, (assuming what Anonymous described is the actual behavior of Freedom 3.0), would now be: "who cares?" What is left in the Freedom product that this would matter? Your ISP and the world are not likely to care that you're using an glorified cookie-manager, and it's my impression that that is what Freedom has now become. However, for the sake of clarity, it would indeed be nice to know what the information those HTTP requests actually means, and for what purpose it is being generated. Also, are there any threats created by such information leakage? How could Freedom 3.0 users be harmed by this? (If the same behavior was present in Freedom 2.0, I can imagine some more obvious immediate threats. If what Dov says is true, it's remarkable that ZKS hadn't been called on this previously. But now that Freedom is no longer an anonymity service, what are the concerns?) -MW-
participants (4)
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Adam Back -
Declan McCullagh -
John Kozubik -
Meyer Wolfsheim