Michael Zimmer.org

January 28, 2010 is Data Privacy Day. To celebrate, MichaelZimmer.org no longer uses any services that rely on web cookies or web bugs…

Google announced today they are changing the expiration date of their cookie from 2038 (the latest possible date) to a rolling 2 year period. Once put into action, users who visit Google today, for example, will receive a cookie that expires on July 16, 2009. If that user never visits a Google website again, that cookie will disappear after those 24 months.
Of course, if that user visits Google again tomorrow, the cookie will renew for a new 2-year period. So, users who visit Google daily (like many), will continue to …

Fellow PhD student Alice Marwick blogs about TechCrunch’s coverage of ClickTale, the latest in website surveillance tools:
ClickTale shows you the full story: every mouse movement, every click and every scrolling action. By using ClickTale you will gain insights that will improve your website’s usability, enhance navigation, and increase effectiveness.
Webmasters can add a small piece of javascript code to their web pages which collects browsing data of all their visitors and transmits it to the ClickTale servers for processing & reporting.
ClickTale does not have a privacy policy, but does offer this …

[I am one of the organizers the following graduate student symposium to be held this fall at NYU]
CALL FOR PAPERS
Identity and Identification in a Networked World:
A Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium
When: September 29-30, 2006
Where: New York University
Submission deadline: July 5, 2006
Increasingly, who we are is represented by key bits of information scattered throughout the data-intensive, networked world. Online and off, these core identifiers mediate our sense of self, social interactions, movements through space, and access to …

To get a better sense of how michaelzimmer.org is being utilized, I have decided to experiment with a StatCounter counter.
This was a difficult decision, being that StatCounter utilizes web cookies to help provide information about what IP addresses access this site and how. I’ve tried to address this concern in the official Privacy Policy for michaelzimmer.org:
michaelzimmer.org strongly believes that you have the right to control the use of your personal information, and that your privacy must be respected.
michaelzimmer.org collects no personally identifiable information, but it does utilize StatCounter.com [privacy policy] …