Michael Zimmer.org

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 …

On the heels of growing public awareness of how “large Web companies are learning more about people than ever from what they search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month,” a New York legislator has drafted a bill seeking to limit how Internet companies collect information about people online and use it for targeted advertising.
According to The Times, the bill “would make it a crime… for certain Web companies to use personal information about consumers …

A recent column by Christopher Soghoian on CNet predicts a decline in companies sharing “anonymized” user data with the academic research community. Along with last year’s AOL data release debacle, Soghoian points to a more recent case where researchers were able to de-anonymize a data set released by Netflix, comprising of 100 million movie ratings made by 500,000 subscribers to their online DVD rental service.
As both a privacy advocate and someone who respects the research information scientists (such as Jim Jansen or Amanda Spink) are able to perform with these …

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 …

The New York Times recently extolled the virtues of using GPS in digital cameras and camera cellphones to “geotag” photos with the location at which they were taken:
…advocates of geotagging, like Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of the photo-sharing Web site Flickr, contend that linking pictures to maps can lend a new dimension to photography. For one thing, it can help people make some sense of the mounds of photos accumulating on their hard drives.
”The value may not be immediately apparent. But 10 years from now, nobody who’s geotagging their photos is …

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 …

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 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]]