April 2006 – MichaelZimmer.org

Peer Surveillance of Pot Smokers at Farrand Field

Posted by Michael Zimmeron April 29, 2006in Privacy, Social Media1 Comment

University of Colorado police have posted online pictures of 150 people (Internet Archive page) smoking pot on the "420" day celebration and are offering a $50 reward for anyone who can identify them. An interesting plea for peer-based surveillance and…

Advertisers Data-Mining on MySpace

Posted by Michael Zimmeron April 28, 2006in Internet, Privacy, Social Media, Values In Design

Chris Hoofnagle is attending the Ad:Tech San Francisco conferences on new advertising technologies, where he has found "several trends that have serious privacy implications." Among these is the gathering data from social networking sites like Friendster and Myspace for marketing…

PA Bill Seeks to Inform Drivers of Black Box in Vehicles

Posted by Michael Zimmeron April 27, 2006in Mobility, Privacy

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a story about a new bill in the Pennsylvania legislature (Senate Bill 1050) that would require car dealers to tell buyers about the existence of automible black boxes and give the car owner greater control over…

Nick Carr: Google Float & Google Gag

Posted by Michael Zimmeron April 26, 2006in Search Engines1 Comment

I recently discovered Nicholas Carr's excellent blog Rough Type. Two recent posts are worth noting. First, he comments on the Google AdSense policy of only paying publishers when they earn more than $100 in their AdSense account: Google doesn't seem…

Jack Balkin: What is Access to Knowledge?

Posted by Michael Zimmeron April 21, 2006in Events, Information Ethics, Information Law & Policy, Internet

Jack Balkin has posted his opening remarks at the Access to Knowledge conference at Yale Law School. In them, he makes three points about the theory of access to knowledge: First, Access to Knowledge is a demand of justice. Second,…

Access to Knowledge

Posted by Michael Zimmeron April 18, 2006in Events, Information Ethics, Information Law & Policy, Internet

This weekend I will be attending an international conference on Access to Knowledge hosted by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. From their site: In the digital era, most multinational corporations and policymakers are of the view that…

Microsoft, Yahoo, potatoes and the NSA

Posted by Michael Zimmeron April 17, 2006in Internet, Privacy, Search Engines

I found this commentary about reports that Microsoft and Yahoo are building massive data storage facilities near a large NSA data-mining facility in rural Washington, and thought I should reproduce it in its entirety. It is simultaneously funny and scary:Microsoft,…

China vs. Germany: Comparing Google’s Censorship Practices

Posted by Michael Zimmeron April 14, 2006in Information Ethics, Social Media3 Comments

Part of Google CEO Eric Schmidt's justification for being complicit with China's censorship of search engine results is that Google does the same thing in Germany and France, so what's the big deal with time around. Consider this recent statement:Asked…

Digital camera plus GPS = Flickr mapping heaven?

Posted by Michael Zimmeron April 13, 2006in Privacy, Social Media3 Comments

I've stumbled across a few blog posts extolling the virtues of having a GPS-enabled digital camera. For example: My wife doesn't want to have to carry around two bulky devices and greatly extend the already considerable time it takes her…

Google defends cooperation with China

Posted by Michael Zimmeron April 12, 2006in Information Ethics, Social Media2 Comments

MSNBC has an article today where Google defends its cooperation with Chinese censorship. Choice quotes from CEO Eric Schmidt include:"We believe that the decision that we made to follow the law in China was absolutely the right one," Schmidt said…