According to an annual survey taken by the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe, Google, as of 2008, is no longer trusted. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

 The San Francisco-based groups noted that Google’s fall from the leagues of “trusted” to “not trusted” puts it in company with such ne’er-do-wells as Countrywide Financial and Bank of America (which acquired Countrywide). When a search engine is getting the same treatment as failing banks you know that the economy is wacky.

 This notion is made even more apparent when considering the fact that Nationwide, the embattled insurance carrier, maintained a spot at ninth for the most trusted companies, and U.S. Bank and eLoan remained in the top 20.

 American Express retained its position at number 1 for the fourth year in a row (this is the survey’s 5^th year), with eBay, IBM, Amazon and Johnson & Johnson rounding out the top five.

 The Ponemon Institute conducted the interview by collecting over 6000 people and asking them which companies they trusted most and least. The answers were then weighted by the subjects’ age, gender and household income to comport with U.S. census data.

 When the data was broken down some surprising trends emerged from the numbers. 45 percent of the responders said that they feel in control of their personal information – a drop from last year’s 48 percent, and further away from the 56 percent in 2006. More than half of those questioned (60 percent) indicated that identity theft negatively affects how they think about a company, and almost as many said they are concerned when a company sends notifications of data breaches.

The CEO of TRUSTe, Fran Maier, said that the results indicated that consumers were becoming more astute about privacy. Dr. Larry Ponemon, the chairman and founder of The Ponemon Institute, said that larger companies, such as IBM, are trusted because of a strong brand, and others, like Apple, are trusted because of the products they sell. With regards to search engines, Dr. Ponemon felt that many people feel sorry for Yahoo! because of the company’s troubles with rivals Microsoft and Google. “Google (and Microsoft) suffer from big company syndrome, people figure that if you’re big and collecting data, there must be an issue.”

An overarching trend among companies that are trusted by consumers is the presence of good privacy practices. Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said that the social network earns peoples’ trust by empowering them. “It shouldn’t be binary, where you either reveal a piece of data to everyone on the Internet or Facebook or not at all,” he said. “We think people want to share more information, but they want choices.”

Although it’s from last year, we only recently noticed this article from PC Magazine about how to reclaim your online privacy. It is worth a read in its entirety, but for the impatient who don’t want to click through, here are some highlights.

Cookies Cookies are little strings of text that Web sites store on your computer as a means to identify you to that site later. [...] Cookies are neither good nor evil. They’re a convenience, and like most conveniences, they come at a price. [...] Browser preferences/options let you opt to accept all cookies, accept only those from sites you visit (eliminating those from third-party advertisers, for example), or never accept them at all. The latter is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot move; go for the “from sites I visit” option and, if you’re paranoid, check the box to be asked for permission before the browser allows the installation of cookies.

Private data The information your browser terms “private” encompasses a lot—everything from your browsing history to download history, the cache of Web page files on your hard drive (aka temporary Internet files), cookies, and even saved passwords. All major browsers can clear all of the above with a button click, and most can be set to delete history whenever the software is closed or by some other time increment. 

Personal Proxies Your broadband modem typically has a unique IP address, and it’s easy for any Web site or other snooper to see; the IP address is usually included in the headers sent with e-mail, too. An IP address alone can easily give an approximation of your location, based on where your ISP is located. [...] What’s needed is a way to surf anonymously that goes beyond browser privacy modes for protection. Luckily, they exist. The fundamental stealth method is an anonymous proxy server. Plug settings from a proxy server into your Internet software (browser and e-mail) and all requests sent to the Internet from that software will be relayed through the proxy. This is also an effective method of making yourself appear to be in another location; the only problem is that you may also find yourself looking at foreign versions of sites like Google, which load languages based on a user’s location. Using a proxy carries the bonus of making your PC less susceptible to outside attacks, but that’s only a problem if you’re not using a router and a software firewall (which you are, right?). Not all proxy servers guarantee anonymity, so choose accordingly. Setting up proxy servers should be simple: You get an IP address and a port number to plug into fields in the options for your browser, e-mail client, and other Internet software.

Encrypted E-mails Using cryptography to ensure that messages can be read only by intended recipients goes back to a time long before e-mail. It’s just easier to implement electronically. [...] Here’s the gist of how public key cryptography like PGP works. You create both a public key and a private key. The former you can tell the world. The latter you tell no one. Ever. All your friends do the same. You use their public key to encrypt things sent to them, they use your public key to send to you. Only your individual private keys can decrypt the messages received, because the public and private keys were created to work hand in hand. Keep things even more on the down-low by creating a “web of trust” between friends, and share your keys only with those in the circle.

Intimate IMs Most IM clients can also send file attachments, which can include malware. It should go without saying, then, that you should accept IMs only from people you know. [...] several of the dominant IM services—AIM, Yahoo!, Microsoft—now offer features like encryption, IM spam blocking, and more, either integrated or through third-party add-ons. Older versions of the AIM client allowed the use of a personal digital certificate for encrypting, just in case someone out there is packet-sniffing your network. You can still get older AIM versions (5.9, for example), and then a free certificate from Comodo.com, or AIMencrypt.com. The current versions of AIM and the business-oriented AIM Pro automatically use SSL when transporting messages, but don’t do certificate encryption anymore. Even Trillian, the multiprotocol IM client, supports this for AIM and ICQ. Yahoo! Messenger has its own stealth and privacy settings, so you can sign on as invisible or ignore people, but it has no encryption of IMs.

An International computer security firm has discovered that popular social news site Digg is being exploited by cybercriminals.

According to PandaLabs, crooks are posing as Digg users and focusing on the site’s celebrity news forums. By all outward appearances, the fake accounts appear legitimate and this is what causes people to click the links that are posted using the fake accounts. Under the auspices of viewing celebrity sex tapes and the like, unwitting users click the link and then are prompted to download and install software in order to view the tawdry video clips. Of course, instead of getting any software to view video the user instead gets a fake diagnostic program.

The fake diagnostic program in turn pretends to scan the user’s hard drive for supposed malware (oh, the irony), finds the “infected” files and offers up a digital solution for a price (it would be something if the program actually uninstalled itself after payment was affected, but this seems unlikely).

Scamming people with a fake Norton-type security scan is one thing, but the real insidiousness of this malware lies in the fact that it hinders the computer’s normal functioning to make the diagnostic more convincing. No word yet on how many people thought they were going to see Paris Hilton’s latest hijinks only to find their CPU underperforming and a “helpful” little program offering to fix the problem.

 Digg has already begun identifying and shutting down the fake profiles. “We are fully aware of the issue at hand and have already taken action,” Jen Burton, Digg’s community manager, said. “Malware accounts reported to us by the community are terminated immediately and all content is removed.” According to Burton, Digg has erased more than 300 suspected malware-spreading accounts.

It was announced yesterday by the American Civil Liberties Union that the Supreme Court will not be hearing the outgoing Bush administration’s case against the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). Mukasey v. ACLU sought to appeal rulings against COPA, which has been enacted since 1998.

COPA specifies a fine of up to USD $50,000 and/or up to 6 months’ imprisonment for the transmission of “any material that is harmful to minors” unless there is payment required to access it, or some sort of pass code. “Intentional” violation of the law carried penalties as well. More to the point, COPA defined “harmful to minors” as anything “communicated” that is “obscene” or that which is “designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest.” These “prurient interests” are to be judged according to “contemporary community standards.” The law gets a little more precise when it states that material which “depicts, describes, or represents, in a manner patently offensive with respect to minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, an actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual act, or a lewd exhibition of the genitals or post-pubescent female breast,” and material that “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors” is a no-go. Makes sense to this author.

However, with all the commercial transactions that are regularly taking place online today, there were bound to be some parties who had their toes stepped on, and not just purveyors of kiddy porn who have moved their offices from back alleys to online shops.

Patricia Nell Warren, of Wildcat Press, was one of the plaintiffs in the suit, and she had this to say about the law as it was written: “[These] two bills were supposedly aimed at hard-core porn but they were so broadly written that they would be used to criminalize the commercial provision of all kinds of legitimate content to minors on the Internet, whether health information or literature. And such laws definitely would be used by ultraconservatives to limit availability of LGBT content on the Web. For this reason, we felt that it was important for us, as a gay-owned small press, to participate in these lawsuits. The Philadelphia Gay News was also involved. The Supreme Court decision puts the onus where it belongs — on parents, who have the right to use software filters to try keeping their minor kids from viewing material that they disapprove of.”

The ACLU, for its part, is trumpeting the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the COPA case as a win for free speech. The ACLU Legal Director Steven R. Shapiro is quoted as saying “[The] government has no right to censor protected speech on the Internet, and it cannot reduce adults to hearing and seeing only speech that the government considers suitable for children.”

 As with all things on the Internet this area is patently gray, and it is only a matter of time before the next case that pushes someone’s (or some community’s) envelope comes along and we go through this all again. In the mean time, Reputation.com recommends that parents monitor what their kids are looking at online, and who they are interacting with on the internet. The best defense is a good offense, and keeping ahead of the ‘net is a good habit that all people, young and old, need to develop.

Always at the forefront of embracing new technology, the Vatican has recently announced that it will be formally be joining the Internet via a new YouTube channel for the pope. Pope Benedict welcomed visitors to the new site encouraging them to “feel involved in this great dialogue of truth.”

 The Vatican has stated that the channel is a novel way for the Church and the Pope to interact and engage a new generation of tech-savvy souls. Pope Benedict has praised sites like Facebook and MySpace in the past for their power to bring people of disparate points of view together, while at the same time acknowledging the danger posed by over indulging in social networking to the point of straining real world relationships. During the World Day of Communications Benedict asked online media producers to preserve the “goodness and intimacy of human sexuality,” no doubt a reference to the ubiquity of porn sites online.

 Monsignor Claudio Maria Celli, the head of the Vatican’s office of social communications says that the pope gave his blessing to the official Vatican YouTube channel, citing Benedict’s status as “a man of dialogue” who, while not being able to reach out to all people, wished to interact with as many people as possible. “It’s true that not all of humanity is found on YouTube, but millions of people meet on YouTube,” Monsignor Celli said. When accessing the Vatican’s YouTube channel Celli indicated that the intent was to make the user feel like they were “in a personal dialogue with the pope.”

 The Vatican also acknowledges that some part of the YouTube channel is an effort to control the image of Pope Benedict and the Vatican online. “It’s undeniable that certain images are already circulating,” Celli said. The Vatican claims that there are numerous unlicensed images of the pontiff being hosted all over the web, and while there is little the Church can do to with regards to external sites, by hosting their own YouTube content they hope to exert some more force over their depiction online.

 A spokesperson for the Vatican, Rev. Federico Lombardi, hopes that Google will aide them in tracking down unlicensed usage of its images, adding that the Vatican “didn’t pay a cent to Google,” like any other YouTube user. The Vatican sees the Pope’s channel as an “offering” to the Internet community, Lombardi said. For its part, Henrique de Castro, Google’s managing director for media solutions, has said that the company is working on verifying that the Pope’s content will be seen in China, where Internet censorship of religious sites is common. The situation is exacerbated by the lack of diplomacy between the Vatican and China.

 Vatican City has had a presence on the web since Christmas Day in 1995, when it launched http://www.vatican.va. Many other large church and national organizations (the Vatican operates as both in one, having been formally recognized by the world community as a sovereign state in 1929, although it is not the Catholic Holy See, per se) have come online in the last decade, including Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, who launched the royal YouTube channel in December 2007, and of course America’s President, Barack Obama.