Mozilla Security Blog

2 comments on “Thoughts on Identity and Privacy”

  1. Anon wrote on

    Isn’t there some way to build in coding checks on the browser platform that force company websites to use encryption when soliciting personal information from site visitors? From signing up for catalogs, brochures, e-newsletters, to requesting product information or providing feedback, these websites are the most basic – and prevalent – type of web security issue.

    Wouldn’t it be easy to force the webpage author to use https format the first time they test their html coding on a Mozilla browser platform?

    These unsecured form websites vastly outnumber security-enhanced that employ encryption to protect solicited form information.

    We can’t really talk about web security until this issue is resolved.

  2. Stardance wrote on

    Privacy is the security of identity (i.e., of “personally identifying information”).

    Actually, the concept of P.I.I. is diminishing in significance, because just about any set of data can be used to identify someone. The person who wants to identify them just has to keep searching databanks for associations between what they know and what they don’t.

    I can’t recall the name, and I don’t know whether it still exists, but there is or was a group of volunteers who specialized in finding the identities of people who died without any identification documents or other means of establishing who they were. Each researcher had some data about the deceased available, and spent a lot of time and effort “mining” databanks in a quest to find out who that person was. They had many successes, and some for whom they had to discontinue the search for lack of sufficient data.