[Note: please be sure to read the comments with responses from Google's Alexander Macgillivray] Joris van Hoboken recently brought this section of the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement to my attention: Section 3.7(e) Google’s Exclusion of Books Google may, at…
Read More Will Google Use “Editorial Discretion” to Exclude Books from Book Search?
As the possible approval of the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement looms, various advocacy groups have brought attention to the fact that Google might gain even greater ability to monitor the books you browse, the pages you read, and even the highlights and marginal notes you make on digital copies of books.
New York Law School professor (and fellow Yale ISP alum), James Grimmelmann, has launched The Public Index: A Website to Study and Discuss the Google Book Search Settlement. From his announcement: The Public-Interest Book Search Initiative at New York Law…
Read More The Public Index: A Website to Study and Discuss the Google Book Search Settlement
Amazon has remotely removed copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from user’s Kindles while crediting their accounts, indicating that the books were improperly added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have the rights to them. More than just an eBook reader, the Kindle represents the latest cog in Amazon's large-scale infrastructure of intellectual surveillance.
I'm a big fan of the New York Times Magazine's weekly column, The Ethicist. I'm not a big fan, however, of the column's namesake, Randy Cohen. He is often much too consequentialist for my liking, too simplistic is his ethical…
Read More The Ethicist Gets it Right with “A Facebook Teaching Moment”
About a year ago, at the 2008 Privacy Law Scholars Conference, I read a draft of a paper that, when presented to the conference attendees, left everyone in the room speechless. The paper revealed a major security hole in a…
Read More Report: Predicting Social Security Numbers from Public Data
I've returned from the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I presented an early draft of a paper based on my critique of the “Taste, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release. The paper was…
Read More Debrief: Computer Ethics/Philosophical Enquiry 2009 in Corfu, Greece
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