Michael Zimmer.org

Speaking of the need to better educate consumers about digital privacy concerns, today’s New York Times features two articles that shed light on two widespread online data collection practices.
The article “Online Age Quiz Is a Window for Drug Makers” notes that RealAge, a popular online quiz meant to determine ones “real age” based how well you treat your body, makes its money by supplying the data, in various forms, to pharmaceutical companies. According to the Times:
Pharmaceutical companies pay RealAge to compile test results of RealAge members and send them marketing …

MIT Technology Review has a brief article highlighting recent research activities in achieving protocols to enable privacy-preserving data mining. The article’s focus is a paper by Andrew Lindell, which he recently presented at Black Hat. From the article:
Lindell is one of a community of researchers studying ways to share this sort of information without exposing private details. Cryptographers have been working on solutions since the 1980s, and as more data is collected about individuals, Lindell says that it becomes increasingly important to find ways to protect data while also allowing …

Information is leverage. Information is power. Information is Maltego.
These are the catch-phrases for a South African company that recently released an affordable, user-friendly data mining tool called Maltego, bringing powerful data-mining technology to the masses.
While targeted mostly to forensics and information security professionals, it is not hard to see how such a tool could be easily deployed to mine the vast amounts of personal and identifiable data people are increasingly sharing in the Web 2.0 world. No longer is it necessary to have the computational power or singular repository of …

Hillary Clinton has been touted as the “privacy candidate” for the 2008 Presidential elections, which is certainly a good reason to consider voting for her (not my sole criterion, but one of the top 5).
This recent NY Times story, however, casts a cloud over any claim she might be able to make as an advocate for privacy rights. It appears that both Bill and Hillary Clinton have benefited from their close relationship to Vinod Gupta, founder of infoUSA, one of the largest brokers of personal information. You might recall that …

For some odd reason, the New York Times has an article declaring that data-mining has now gone mainstream:
…a wave of sophisticated computing and mathematical analytics that is moving into the mainstream. Fueling the trend are the digitization of information, ever faster and cheaper computing, and the explosion of online networks and data collection.
Sorry, Gray Lady, this isn’t some new thang. This has been going on or quite a while.
This is probably best argued in James Beniger’s The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. In this detailed …

Bruce Schneier discusses an article (subscription required) about a start-up company called Jetera, who plans to combine people’s flight data with their financial & credit data in order to create in-flight personalization as well as pre- and post-flight mailings and other personalized services:
Jetera would start with an airline’s information on individual passengers on board a given flight, drawing the name, address, credit card number and loyalty club status from reservations data. Through a process, for which it seeks a patent, the company would match the passenger’s identification data with the …

Gene at Fred’s House sounds like one of the multitude who are beginning to embrace the “Google lifestyle”:
I look around my desktop and I see Google Reader, Google Mail, Google Talk, Google Toolbar, Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google News, Google Analytics, Google Earth, and of course Google Google. Google WiFi was a pleasant surprise when I was in Mt View a few weeks ago, and last night I found pizza…using mobile Google on my phone. All of these things are becoming indispensable tools for me, and I really like using …

The Volokh Conspiracy reports on a Sixth Circuit decision in a Fourth Amendment case that addresses whether querying a database triggers Fourth Amendment protection. The majority concludedthat it does not: If the government collected the data in the database in compliance with the Fourth Amendment, analyzing that data does not implicate the Fourth Amendment.
I certainly don’t have the training to analyze this decision from a legal perspective, but one commenter illuminates concerns with such a ruling:
This ruling is very troubling for the following reasons:
* The 4th amendment only applies to …

The Privacy Rights Clearninghouse provides a very useful list of online data vendors along with URLs and instructions to remove your information from their databases.

The Dumb Little Man blog reveals how easy it can be to figure out who a person is, where they live, and what their daily routine & activities are by simply searching through public online calendars (like Google Calendar) and some simple searches or 411 calls.
[via Slashdot]]

The Washington Post reports on the FBI’s new counterterrorism database to help the war on terror:

The FBI has built a database with more than 659 million records — including terrorist watch lists, intelligence cables and financial transactions — culled from more than 50 FBI and other government agency sources. The system is one of the most powerful data analysis tools available to law enforcement and counterterrorism agents, FBI officials said yesterday.
The FBI demonstrated the database to reporters yesterday in part to address criticism that its technology was …

A group of computer scientists from the University of Minnesota recently presented a fascinating paper “You are what you say: privacy risks of public mentions,” Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval, 2006.
Their concern is the ability to identify pseudononymous people by comparing datasets of their “public mentions.” For example, could Amazon  reidentify customers on competitors’ websites by comparing their purchase history against public reviews written on those sites?
Here’s a blurb from the paper’s abstract:
In today’s data-rich networked world, people express …

Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal has an extensive look at how Google might leverage their acquisition of Neven Vision to help identify and inter-connect users’ various web products (blogs, forums, social networking sites, etc) that might not otherwise be shared under a common login. The conclusion:
…if social networking is the future of online communication and Google is going to use Social Network profile information to personalize their search engines, but does not have a way of identifying the owner of the profile on some social networks due to no …

The Register warns that Amazon.com is planning to create the “world’s biggest personal data stash.” Their source is this Seattle Post Intelligencer report on the detailed patent application Amazon filed with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office:
Amazon.com is developing a system to gather and keep massive amounts of intimate information about its millions of shoppers, including their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and income.
The database, which would combine information disclosed voluntarily by customers with facts gleaned from public databases, conceivably would give Amazon a larger or more detailed profile of …

The Google Operating System blog reports that when uploading pictures for your contacts, Gmail will ask you to crop the picture, to separate the face of the person. The result? Google has a database of multiple images for a lot of people, along with their names, e-mail addresses, street addresses, phone numbers, and whatever else contact information you include.
Combined with Riya, where users have upoaded over 7 million personal photos to Riya’s servers and tagged and labeled the subject’s faces to be searchable via Riya’s facial recognition technology, we are …