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 …

Taking contextual advertising to the next logical level, it has been reported that a recent patent filing indicates Microsoft want to develop an advertising framework that uses applications and data on one’s computer, rather than one’s actions on the Web, to provide context for triggering ads. Imagine writing a letter in Word and having the (already annoying) paperclip pop up and try to sell you something based on what you’re typing (see image). From the report:
The advertising software, which could be part of the operating system, a standalone app, or …

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 …

A new study by ChoiceStream, a (surprise!) provider of online personalization products, announces their latest personalization survey reveals an increasing number of web users are willing to provide personal information in order to receive personalized services. From the summary at EContent:
According to the survey, the number of consumers willing to provide demographic information in exchange for a personalized online experience has grown over the past year, increasing 24% to a total of 57% of all respondents. The Survey also finds an increase in the number of consumers willing to allow …

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 …

Blogging has been light lately as I’m busy (a) finalizing details for the Identity & Identification in a Networked World symposium at NYU, (b) working out the logistics for my upcoming research trip to Europe (which now also includes a stop at Aalborg University in Denmark), and (c) trying to make some progress on the dissertation.
Regarding the diss, I’ve been writing on how web search engine providers have relied upon what I refers to as infrastructures of dataveillance to collect and aggregate data about users across services:
These infrastructures rely on …

John Battelle repeats an important concern regarding the extensive profiles search engine providers, like Google, are amassing on each user. He quotes Greg Linden’s reaction to a Google paper on Bigtable, a distributed storage system:
One tidbit I found curious in the Google Bigtable paper was this hint about the internals of Google Personalized Search:
“Personalized Search generates user profiles using a MapReduce over Bigtable. These user profiles are used to personalize live search results.”
This appears to confirm that Google Personalized Search works by building high-level profiles of user interests from …

The collaborators at the important “On the Identity Trail” project in Canada were kind enough to ask me to write an essay for their blog. Here is an excerpt:
Surveillance in Spheres of Mobility: Privacy, Technical Design and the Flow of Personal Information on the Transportation and Information Superhighways
A recent Nassau County Supreme Court ruling held that data retrieved from a vehicle’s black box – a computer module that records a vehicle’s speed and telemetry data in the last five seconds before airbags deploy in a collision – could be admitted …

At a roundtable lunch with reporters, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt remarked that he “expects advertising will be the growth engine of Google for a very long time,” noting specifically that “Google ads are very targetable, because Google knows a lot about the person surfing, especially if they have used personal search or logged into a service such as Gmail.”
Google. knows. a lot. about. you.
BTW, the original scholarly paper by Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page warned of the dangers of advertising-based web search systems:
Currently, the predominant business model for …

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: …

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 …

Katie Hafner of the New York Times writes how some Internet users have changed their search habits now that concerns about government surveillance of web seaches has reached the forefront of the public mind. Among the many anecdotes related in the piece is a user feels it necessary to divulge to her partner why she searched for the term “rent boy,” and who later:
…pointed to a continuing interest she has in the Palestinian elections. “If I followed my curiosity and did some Web research, going to Web sites of the …

Following up on the recent Wired News article on how to protect the privacy of your search engine usage, Danny Sullivan has prepared a much more detailed description of the kinds of tracks left behind when using a search engine, and tactics for covering one’s tracks. See “Protecting Your Search Privacy: A Flowchart To Tracks You Leave Behind”.

Given that concerns over search engine privacy have finally gone mainstream, Wired News provides a brielf article on How to Foil Search Engine Snoops. Check it out.

Microsoft has announced that it plans to enter the search advertising market, creating their own advertising system to rival Google and Yahoo. Microsoft’s “improvement” is to by allow advertisers to aim ads on its search pages to users based on their sex, age or location.
Matching a user’s search history with her personal characteristics (which Microsoft will know if she is a Hotmail or Passport user) has potential privacy implications, which I’ve discussed previously here and here.