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 …

A new service called Others Online makes obvious what Google Toolbar and other browser tools do in the background: track users web browsing activities. From their site:
Others Online is a free toolbar that shows you people relevant to your Web browsing and other interests, on every page you visit. We show you the interests you have in common, their Web pages (blog, MySpace profile, Web site, etc.) and online status, all on their terms. We’ll even connect you by IM or email.
…Every time you search the Web, you’ll see people …

Given the increased frequency of revelations about government data gathering and surveillance stories, Dan Solove has created a quick and easy template to help news outlets report on these stories:
Under a top secret program initiated by the Bush Administration after the Sept. 11 attacks, the [name of agency (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.)] have been gathering a vast database of [type of records] involving United States citizens.
“This program is a vital tool in the fight against terrorism,” [Bush Administration official] said. “Without it, we would dangerously unsafe, and the terrorists would …

Privacy law expert and law professor Dan Solove (I reviewed his latest book, The Digital Person, here) and Chris Hoofnagle (of EPIC) have published the first draft of “A Model Regime of Privacy Protection.” From the abstract:
Privacy protection in the United States has often been criticized, but critics have too infrequently suggested specific proposals for reform. Recently, there has been significant legislative interest at both the federal and state levels in addressing the privacy of personal information. This was sparked when ChoicePoint, one of the largest data brokers in the …

(Via Privacy Digest) The New York Times reviews Robert O’Harrow’s new book No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society:
…Mr. O’Harrow provides in these pages an authoritative and vivid account of the emergence of a “security-industrial complex” and the far-reaching consequences for ordinary Americans, who must cope not only with the uneasy sense of being watched (leading, defenders of civil liberties have argued, to a stifling of debate and dissent) but also with the very palpable dangers of having personal information (and in some cases, …

I just finished Daniel Solove’s The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age. Here are excerpts from my review of the book for the academic journal Ethics & Information Technology.
…Solove, an associate law professor at George Washington University Law School, argues that our common conceptualization of the privacy problem as “Big Brother” – some all-knowing, constantly vigilant government entity that regulates every aspect of our lives through constant and total surveillance – fails to account for the new threats to personal privacy in our information age. It …