Michael Zimmer.org

Following up on my Web 2.0 panel at 4S, I just returned from another quick trip to Canada — this time Vancouver — for the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, where I organized a similar panel titled “Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0: Surveillance, Discipline, Labor.” I again had the pleasure of presenting alongside Anders Albrechtslund, Søren Mørk Petersen, along with Kylie Jarrett, and my former NYU collegaue, Bilge Yesil. We were lucky to have David Silver perform the duties of respondent, and he posted his valuable insights …

In my dissertation I outline the quest for the “perfect search engine” – a search engine capable of indexing all available information and providing fast and relevant results. The perfect search engine will have to have “perfect reach” to deliver any type of online content from all online (and, increasingly, offline) sources, as well as “perfect recall” to deliver personalized and relevant results that are informed by who the searcher is.
For example, given a search for “Paris Hilton,” the perfect search engine will know whether to deliver results about the …

I recently had the pleasure of attending an excellent workshop on “privacy advocacy” hosted by the Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley. The goal was to get privacy advocates in the room with academics who work on privacy in order to encourage “cross-pollination” and – from my perspective – help illuminate the kind of scholarship that would benefit advocacy most. (The workshop was “off the record” so I don’t want to blog about too many of the details without explicit permission from the various participants)
I helped lead a discussion …

I’m supposed to be on vacation this week, but felt compelled to blog about this…
There has been increased attention lately about Google’s data retention policies and the impact its drive towards personalization might have on user privacy. In response, one of Google’s chief privacy lawyers, Peter Fleisher, whose opinion I normally have high regard for, has penned an op-ed piece (also found here and here) that recently appeared in the Financial Times.
The title of Fleisher’s piece is “Google’s search policy puts the user in charge” — a claim that is …

In my dissertation I outline the quest for the “perfect search engine” – a search engine capable of indexing all available information and providing fast and relevant results. The perfect search engine will have to have “perfect reach” to deliver any type of online content from all online (and, increasingly, offline) sources, as well as “perfect recall” to deliver personalized and relevant results that are informed by who the searcher is.
For example, given a search for “Paris Hilton,” the perfect search engine will know whether to deliver results about the …

Gord Hotchkiss, the president of a search engine marketing firm, writes what at first appears to be a thoughtful and reflective essay on how the rise of behavioral targeting within the search engine advertising market (his bread and butter):
The mechanisms are already in place for search engines to track your online behavior. Tool bars, mini apps, personal search history. All of these can and do track where you’ve been. Everybody is being tracked to some degree.
But as Seana pointed out in her column, most of us are blissfully unaware of …

I am pleased to announce that I have been awarded a Science & Society Dissertation Improvement Grant from the Division of Social and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation.
This grant will support my dissertation research of the value implications of two emerging technologies of everyday life: networked vehicle systems and web search engines. Networked vehicle systems (GPS-based navigational tools, automated toll collection, automobile black boxes, and vehicle safety communication systems) rely on the transmission, collection and aggregation of a particular vehicle’s location and telemetry data. The drive towards the …

Google’s drive to “organize all the world’s information” is no joke, and they want that to inlucde all “100% of user data” according to notes from a Google presentation found by Greg Linden:
Theme 2: Store 100% of User Data
With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).
We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. For example: …

It has been over a year since a Google Calendar service was first hinted at, but it seems they have now started beta-testing a product called “CL2″ (screenshots here).
To repeat my original privacy-related concerns, Google is moving more and more towards building a broad information infrastructure which requires setting up accounts which link personal information across services. Doing this allows Google to aggregate all your personal content (Gmail, calendar entries, etc) in order to not only provide you a more personalized search experience (perhaps a good thing), but also to …

One of the key arguements for collecting personal search histories is that a “perfect search engine” will use this personal information to deliver more relevant advertisements. The supposition is that the search engines benefit from selling a more detailed profile to marketers, marketers save money by presenting only relevant ads to interested users, and users aren’t bothered with irrelevant advertising.
But Chris Hoofnagle points to this article, published in a database-marketing-industry magazine, that refutes the data industry’s own argument on the creation of a perfect marketplace through the use of consumer …

The Register reports on a recent poll finding that “More than three quarters of web surfers don’t realize Google records and stores information that may identify them.” While I can’t vouch for the validity of the poll, it certainly seems to provide evidence that web users have at least some level of expectation of privacy when it comes to their web searches.
The article goes on to mention the various methods for Google (or other online companies) to collect vast amounts of personal information:
Google maintains a lifetime cookie that expires …

There’s been quite a push lately for what I’m calling the “perfect search” – a search engine that is personalized, local, implicit, predictive, etc. This is something I will be writing more about soon, especially whether there will be room for political and ethical values in the design of such “perfect” search tools. But for now, take a look at this related article “Searching for a Better World”. Personally, I think this quote is the best:
Senior Microsoft researcher Susan Dumais says her work is about making search more relevant to …

CNET reports that the University of California at Berkeley is creating an interdisciplinary center for advanced search technologies in search of creating the “ultimate search tool” and to “address the explosive growth of Internet search and the complex issues that have arisen in the field.” Such issues (many of which I’ve previously commented on) include privacy, fraud, multimedia search and personalization. From the article:
“We want to solve the problems that have been engendered by the success of search,” Wilensky said in an interview. Wilensky is a professor of computer science …