A federal judge ruled that the police must stop the routine videotaping of people at public gatherings. Reversing (and clarifying) an earlier ruling, the judge stated that such public surveillance is allowable only if there was an indication that unlawful…
Read More Judge Restricts New York Police Surveillance of Public Spaces
ASPnews.com reports that Google has complied with subpoenas issued by the U.S. District Court in Northern California and provided 20th Century Fox the identities of two individuals who illegally uploaded entire episodes of "24" to YouTube prior to its broadcast…
27B Stroke 6 outlines four important pieces of privacy-protecting legislation that have either been recently introduced or received new life in the Democratically-controlled House of Representatives: * The Prevention of Fraudulent Access to Phone Records Act, introduced by Dingell and…
Read More House Introduces Privacy Bill Foursome…With One Runt in the Litter
Here's a chilling first-person account of a university professor who was asked to stop using the anonymizing network software, Tor. University IT and campus security staffers came knocking on Prof. Paul Cesarini's door asking why he was using Tor, and…
BBC columnist Bill Thompson warns readers that new DRM technology, especially that found in Vista, is damaging the freedoms that the Internet was based on: The freedom of expression that was once available to users of the Internet Protocol is…
MIT's Technology Review has a brief article about advances in zoom technology for cellphone cameras. This adds a new dimension to the privacy and surveillance threats cellphone cameras pose. We experienced a major advancement in camera zoom technology around the…
Read More Cellphone Cameras That Zoom…What would Warren & Brandeis Think?
Two years ago I blogged about a very chilling precedent from an upstate New York federal judge who ruled that police can secretly attach Global Positioning System (GPS) devices to a suspect’s vehicle without a warrant, stating that suspects had…
Read More Another Court Ruling on GPS Tracking without Warrant
The website for NYU's Council for Media & Culture, who co-sponsored our "Identity and Identification in a Networked World" symposium, has launched: The Council for Media and Culture provides a forum for scholarly and public ventures that probe the form…
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that TiVo is collecting and selling data on what parts of broadcasts people are rewinding for review and what commercials they are skipping. Dubbed "StopWatch," this data-collection practice reflects the growing ease with which various…
Another slick video, courtesy of Michael Wesch and the Digital Ethnography group at Kansas State, revealing how Web 2.0 infrastructures represent a shift from "structure" to "content" in the flow of information, which forces us to rethink copyright, identity, ethics,…
MichaelZimmer.org 
You must be logged in to post a comment.