Delete Evernote Note Location

 Identity and Privacy, Technology  1 Response »
Nov 202012
 

I’m sure there are people who like hav­ing Ever­note track where they recor­ded some note, but there are also some of us who don’t. Yes, I tend to be slightly pri­vacy-ori­ented, or even more than slightly at times. If you’re in that cat­egory, here’s one way to delete the locations.

First off, they often come in when you have the Ever­note app on your phone. On Android, to turn off the auto-loc­a­tion, you need to go to the Ever­note app on your phone, go into set­tings, and click on “Oth­er Options”. You should see some­thing that says “Loc­a­tion for new notes” with two pos­sible options under­neath, one for GPS, and one for wire­less net­works. Make sure they’re both turned off. You might like to turn off Auto-title while you’re there, espe­cially if you don’t like Ever­note read­ing your cal­en­dar to find an appoint­ment or date to write in that title. Yes, I know, I’m sure there are people who find this use­ful. I don’t.

Hav­ing done your best to ensure loc­a­tions aren’t added to future posts, let’s get rid of the already-exist­ing ones. These instruc­tions are for Ever­note 5.0 on the Mac. Find the note, and double-click on it to open it in the edit­ing win­dow. Click on the ital­ic ‘i’ in the top right corner. Then click on the arrow head next to the loc­a­tion field. That gets rid of the loc­a­tion. You may be asked to update the loc­a­tion to your cur­rent loc­a­tion; I only needed to say ‘no’ once. Close the edit­ing win­dow and you’re done! Yes, this does reset the updated date, so if that mat­ters, copy it before mak­ing your changes so you can change it back again.

There may be a pro­gram­mat­ic way to do this, but I only had 5 notes with loc­a­tion inform­a­tion on them, so I did­n’t need it.

Requiring OmniAuth

 Identity and Privacy, Technology  No Responses »
Aug 312011
 

A small note in the “in case I need this again” category.

I’m writ­ing a Sinatra app and want to add Twit­ter OAu­th for sign­ing in. A good way to do this appears to be with the omniauth gem but I ran into an issue. require 'oa-oauth' is the doc­u­mented way to require the right gem, but the error I was get­ting was ‘require’: no such file to load — oa-oau­th (Load­Er­ror), des­pite hav­ing installed the gem. I use RVM to con­trol the Ruby envir­on­ment, so also checked I’d installed the gem with the RVM ver­sion set to the ver­sion of Ruby I was using (1.9.2). Hunt­ing around I found a par­tial answer on the issues list. Par­tial, because the answers there did­n’t help, but the sug­ges­tion to try bundle show omniauth did. Bundle came back with Could not find gem ‘omni­au­th’ in the cur­rent bundle.

The answer turned out to be to edit the Gem­file to add gem omniauth to it, then run­ning bundle install. After that, bundle show omniauth found the gem, and require 'oa-oauth' in my Ruby app worked as well.

Facebook Privacy Settings

 Identity and Privacy  No Responses »
Dec 072007
 

I’ve writ­ten in this blog before about Face­book’s pri­vacy issues, and the import­ance of mak­ing sure the pri­vacy set­tings in your Face­book pro­file match what you want to have hap­pen to your per­son­al data. Bri­an pos­ted on this same top­ic and has some good points and detailed instruc­tions; the com­ments are also worth reading.

I went and checked my set­tings and found they looked a little dif­fer­ent to what I remembered, so it’s prob­ably a good idea to check your set­tings on a reg­u­lar basis; as Face­book changes what they do they may change which options exist. And think about what you want, about that bal­ance between let­ting out enough inform­a­tion so old friends can find you again (as lots of people want) and mak­ing sure that not too much inform­a­tion gets out. I changed most of mine to “friends only” from the default “my net­works and friends”; maybe at some stage I’ll change some of them back again but for the time being I feel more com­fort­able this way. 

Web 2.0: Issues

 Identity and Privacy, Presentations  3 Responses »
Nov 132007
 

There are some issues with Web 2.0, mostly in the areas of pri­vacy, secur­ity, copy­right — all those things you’d rather you did­n’t need to worry about. Take pri­vacy for example. On many social net­work­ing sites people sign up and then put in all their per­son­al inform­a­tion simply because there’s a field there for it. Often those pro­files are pub­lic by default, rather than private, and often they’re open to search engines as well. So people think their inform­a­tion is private and then dis­cov­er it isn’t, and have to go search­ing through menus to find out how to turn on those pri­vacy fil­ters that are turned off by default. In many cases what’s good for the site own­ers isn’t neces­sar­ily good for the users. One big factor in Flick­r’s early suc­cess was the fact that uploaded pho­tos could be seen by the world unless spe­cific­ally made private, and lots of users did (and still do) get con­fused by copy­right issues (cre­at­ive com­mons licenses don’t solve the issue of what “pub­lic domain” etc actu­ally mean).

Then there’s the per­sona issue. I might have a leg­al but slightly embar­rass­ing hobby that I don’t want work know­ing about. So I need to set up a sep­ar­ate online iden­tity for that — people need to think about the implic­a­tions of this in advance if they don’t want cor­rel­a­tions of that hobby per­sona with their “real” one on the basis of an address or phone num­ber or email.

Oth­er prob­lems with the pleth­ora of new Web 2.0 social net­work­ing sites: they often don’t under­stand what pri­vacy and user con­sent mean. You sign up for some­thing, they ask you to upload your address book to see wheth­er oth­er friends are already there, the next thing you know they’ve done spam-a-friend and emailed every­one in your address book without your know­ledge, let alone your con­sent. Or they ask you to give them your user­name and pass­word to some oth­er social net­work­ing site under the “trust us, we will do no evil” motto (whatever happened to “trust but verify”?).

There are some solu­tions to this: users have to be care­ful about the inform­a­tion they hand out (fake birth­d­ates, any­one?) and start demand­ing that sites take care of their inform­a­tion. If I want to hand out inform­a­tion to the world, that’s my decision, but it should­n’t be up to some web site to make that decision for me.

The last of a series on Web 2.0, taken from my talk at the CSW Sum­mer School in July 2007. Here’s the series introduction.

Customizing Google

 Identity and Privacy  No Responses »
Nov 042007
 

For those, like me, who are some­what pri­vacy-ori­ented, and use Fire­fox as their browser, I recom­mend using the Cus­tom­ize Google exten­sion. I set it up to use https for access­ing Google docs, read­er, and cal­en­dar, and to anonym­ize the Google ID for search­ing. You can also anonym­ize the Google ana­lyt­ics cook­ie, which I’m not doing for the time being. It has a bunch of oth­er fea­tures that might be of interest as well, such as set­ting vari­ous pref­er­ences or tak­ing selec­ted sites out of search res­ults (e.g., adult sites for your kids). I’ve been using it for a month and have had no prob­lems with it.

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