Michael Zimmer.org

I’ve been incredibly busy lately, and need to quickly catch up on some recent items of note:

• Siva Vaidhyanathan has launched a new blog for his forthcoming book, “The Googlization of Everything“…
• …while Cory Doctorow provides his fictional vision of Google at its most evil extreme, working with Homeland Security to monitor and track citizens. My favorite passage: “In the grand scheme of things, it hadn’t cost Google much to wire the city with webcams. Especially when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting.”
• Speaking of books, Dan Solove’s latest, “The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet,” just hit the shelves. Should be amazing.
• David Fraser reports that Google is going to blur faces in the Canadian version of its Street View product after a privacy commissioner raised concerns about the service. (More on this later)
• Google has posted a 2nd video in its series attempting to explain their privacy policies. This one is about personalization, and the money line is “knowing about you, in particular, can be our most valuable tool.”
• Google also seems poised to taken on Facebook by (reportedly) planning to release new APIs to leverage its social platforms.
• Netherlands-based Bits of Freedom, and my friend and colleague Joris van Hoboken, announced the winner of the 2007 Big Brother award: you.
• In a similar vein, Michael Arntfield blogs at the Identity Trail about wikisurveillance, “the manner in which the community at large has been seduced by, or at the very least summarily acceded to, the idea of watching, recording, reporting, and even the expectation, or exhibitionism, of being watched, as the new de facto social contract for the post-industrial age.” (This concept has similarities to my probe on “netaveillance“)

Ok, back to work.