Andrew Keen's new book, The Cult of the Amateur, attacks the rise of the “amateur” amid various Internet and Web 2.0 phenomena, and outlines the various harms — economic, social, cultural and political — these amateurs will inevitably cause. I…
Month: May 2007
Which ISPs Are Spying on You?
Wired has posted the results of their survey of the major ISPs regarding their tracking and data retention policies. I've created a table summarizing the results: How long do you retain records of the IP addresses assigned to customers? Do…
Facebook Allowing Profiles to be Crawled by Google
Remember last fall when Facebook got itself in all kinds of trouble for unilaterally creating and automatically activating "feeds" of its users' changes to their profile pages? They scrambled to try to reign in this privacy-threatening feature, and promised to…
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Amateur Facial Recognition Creeps Closer
The ability for everyday users of search engines to query particular faces is creeping closer. Google OS reports that Google has (kind of quietly) added a feature to their Image Search service to restrict the results to people's faces. For…
Google’s “Street View” and Privacy in Public
About 6 months ago Microsoft launched their Windows Live Local Virtual Earth service, providing street level images of San Francisco and Seattle. You can drive or walk around the map and view the streets and storefronts…and the people. This detailed…
Privacy and Surveillance in Web 2.0: Unintended Consequences and the Rise of “Netaveillance”
[This thought piece appears on the On The Identity Trail project's blog, blog*on*nymity. Thanks to the amazing folks there for the (second) invitation to contribute to the project. -mz] This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts…
Google & Dell Taking Your Spelling Mistakes to the Bank
It wasn't so long ago that Google was complaining about Internet Explorer 7’s search box will ship with Microsoft’s MSN Search as the default search engine. I, like most commentators, quickly scolded Google for being hypocritical since they enjoy default…
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Anti-Sit Technologies
Those familiar with my work know I'm interested in how technologies can embody values, or more specifically, how the design of technologies bears directly and systematically on the realization – or suppression – of social, ethical, and political values, such…
Clintons in Relationship with Privacy-Violating Info Broker
Hillary Clinton has been touted as the "privacy candidate" for the 2008 Presidential elections, which is certainly a good reason to consider voting for her (not my sole criterion, but one of the top 5). This recent NY Times story,…
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Digital Social Responsibility: Searching for Ethics on the Internet (June 7, NYC)
The Japan Society of New York is hosting a very interesting event titled "Digital Social Responsibility: Searching for Ethics on the Internet" on Thursday, June 7, 2007 from 2:00 to 6:00 PM. This seminar will feature keynote speaker Craig Newmark,…
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