Cyveillance Revisited
By Ian Scott
A few years back, I wrote the article, “Who Is Cyveillance And Why Should You Care?” and it’s been a fairly popular post here at Security & Privacy. Some weeks ago, I received an email about the article from a “Ray M.” Ray writes,
“Regarding:
http://secpriv.com/who-is-cyveillance-and-why-should-you-care
I will try and keep this as professional as possible. This organization is a major player in the anti-fraud and anti-crime industries. I work in this industry and have personally met the people of this organization. To get to the point, your assessment is inaccurate, but I commend you for the effort.”
I have not had time to remark on Ray’s email, but thought I would do so today.
First, thank you Ray for the email. I don’t mind getting emails from folk who disagree with me. I also don’t have problems with organizations that are involved in anti-fraud and anti-crime. What I do have an issue with are the methods that Cyveillance has been known to use.
My hard drive on my server is my personal property. My bandwidth is something I pay for. Cyveillance has decided that it wants to search my hard drive and ignore the robots.txt file, and therefore uses bandwidth I am paying for and the resources of my computer equipment that I have paid for. If someone believes there is something fraudulent or criminal, they can get a search warrant instead of using these surreptitious and sneaky methods which invade my privacy.
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