Michael Zimmer.org

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 accepted a joint-appointment as an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. I consider myself lucky that one of Siva’s final tasks as NYU was to be on my dissertation committee. My research has benefited greatly from Siva’s guidance. Good luck, Siva!
• Data Mining and the Security-Liberty Debate: Dan Solove has written an important essay entitled “Data Mining and the Security-Liberty Debate,” where he examines some common difficulties in the way that liberty is balanced against security in the context of data mining.
• Latanya Sweeney profiled in Scientific American: Nice profile. Prof. Sweeney is best known for her amazing research revealing that 87 percent of Americans can be personally identified by records listing only their birth date, gender and ZIP code, bringing into question claims that databases lacking names are truly anonymous.
• YouTube transitioning to Google Accounts: Following their trend of linking new & acquired services to a singe account login, Google now allows users to sign up for YouTube with their Google Account, ensuring that a user’s video habits are logged alongside their search activity (and, in the future, allowing one’s search history inform the contextual ads placed within YouTube).
• NYC: Privacy Is an Issue for Critics of Cameras: NYC’s plan to institute congestion pricing, along with the requisite array of license plate recognition surveillance cameras, is drawing much-needed criticism from privacy advocates.
• And just today, a federal appeals court ruled that e-mail has similar constitutional privacy protections as telephone communications, meaning that federal investigators who search and seize emails without obtaining probable cause warrants will now have to do so. More at EFF and Threat Level.