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 -----

From: Declan McCullagh 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]

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-