I recently had the pleasure of attending an excellent workshop on "privacy advocacy" hosted by the Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley. The goal was to get privacy advocates in the room with academics who work on privacy in…
Month: June 2007
Function Creep 101: Surveillance Cameras and Social Norms
Jeremy Hunsinger points to this disturbing report about how a dean of students at a Washington high school thought he saw two girls kissing, so he checked the school's surveillance footage to confirm it. He then proceeded to share what…
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Google: “Why we’re buying DoubleClick” (sans “privacy”)
Google has posted a lengthy explanation as to why they're buying Double Click. Feel free to read it, but here's my thumbnail analysis: Total word count = 2,279 Number of times "consumer" appears = 8 Number of times "money" or…
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WSJ: When Public Records Are Too Public
Jason Fry, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, writes about the increasing lack of "security via obscurity" as more and more public records become searchable online. While this is old news for many of us, it's nice to see…
A Bit More on Libraries, Privacy, and Intellectual Freedom
Continuing the theme of libraries, privacy, and intellectual freedom from a few weeks ago, two items popped up in my blogroll today: Wired's Threat Level tells an incredible story about the plight of two Connecticut librarians who received national security…
Read More A Bit More on Libraries, Privacy, and Intellectual Freedom
Is Google just the tip of the iceberg?
Seth Finkelstein has a thoughtful piece on Google and privacy in the Guardian, which includes this insight: The lack of substantive knowledge about Google's actions, combined with general concerns regarding how its logs could be abused, makes it difficult to…
Following up on Google Street View
There continues to be quite a bit of buzz and concern about Google's “Street View” enhancement for Google Maps. A couple of comments on recent developments: ::: I don't want to be picky, but given all the (necessary) attention given…
Perspectives on Surveillance
Related to my earlier mention of the challenges of relying on Panoptic theory to talk about surveillance, Anders Albrechtslund has posted an informal taxonomy of "21 perspectives on surveillance": The Big Brother perspective Surveillance is a scary way for the…
Debrief: Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar hosted by the Surveillance Project at Queens University. The seminar was led by world-class surveillance studies experts: David Lyon, Kevin Haggerty, and Kirstie Ball. About twenty graduate…
Catching up…
I'm back from a celebratory break and a week at the Surveillance Studies Summer Seminar (will blog about that shorty), and need to quickly catch up on some items from my blogroll: NYU's loss is UVA's gain: Siva Vaidhyanathan has…
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