Michael Zimmer.org

The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School is seeking applicants for 2009-2010 postdoctoral fellowships.  The ISP resident fellowships are designed for recent graduates of law or Ph.D. programs who are interested in careers in teaching and public service in any of the following areas:  law and innovation; Internet and telecommunications law and policy; intellectual property law; access to knowledge; first amendment law; media studies; privacy; civil liberties online; cybercrime and cybersecurity; social software; standards and technology policy; bioethics, biotechnology, and law and genomics; and law, technology, and culture …

Educators often use (or want to use) copyrighted materials from mass media and popular culture in building students’ critical thinking and communication skills. For example, I often have students analyze a particular website or a television ad to identify bias and source credibility. Or, we watch popular movies depicting high-tech surveillance (Enemy of the State, Eagle Eye, etc), hoping to unpack both the technology itself, and how such films might desensitize our general concerns with such privacy invasions.
Yet, despite the rise of digital media tools for learning and sharing, fear …

Following up on the experience of others (here, here, and here), I’ve run some test searches of my own on the hot new Cuil search engine. The results were not cool. I performed three different kinds of searchs: information-seeking, navigational, and vanity. More after the fold.

Millions of Web 2.0 users share their personal information, photos, bookmarks, and lives online. And, of course, various concerns arise about the fact that so much (what was once considered) private information is being publicly shared with anyone with an Internet connection. To help users manage the flow of their personal information online, many services offer the ability to make certain content “private.” For example, Facebook has an extensive (and, as a result, somewhat complicated) interface to restrict access to various parts of a user’s profile, and photo sharing sites …

I think we’ve all heard now that Jimbo Wales has set his sights on creating a search engine to rival Google, Yahoo and the rest of the gang. It is currently under development as Wikia Search (but I’m guessing the name will change at some point to something more slick, like Mahalo or Sproose). The mission of Wikia Search is to “generate a new kind of search engine, which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot.” At its core are 4 principles:

Transparency – Openness in how the systems …

Just a quick meta-post about the blog:
While I am committed to keeping the blog ad-free (no Ads by Goooooogle, thank you), I have decided to add some buttons for a few campaigns that I believe in:

Individual-i:
Today, the rights of individuals are being eroded: by government, by corporations, by society itself. This icon — the Individual-i — represents the rights of the individual.It represents the right to privacy and anonymity in the information age. It represents the rights to an open government, due process, and equal protection under the law. It …

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 …

Have you ever searched for your social security number to see if it happened to be posted online somewhere? Have you searched for it along with your name? Many do, and it has apparently been confirmed that the massive database of search history AOL released does include searches with users’ social security numbers.
From the Interesting People mailing list:
A search for an SSN shaped regex on the full AOL search data returns a 191 results including repeat searches. Many of these have full names, and at …

Alice Marwick provides useful thoughts on the privacy and data-mining issues surrounding the sharing of personal data on Web 2.0 apps. She shares three common “solutions” to the “problem” of teenagers’ divulgence of personal information:
1. Young people should stop putting content online.
2. Recruiters and employers shouldn’t use Google or Facebook to research potential candidates (don’t hear this one very often, although you’d think in a country where it’s illegal to ask people to include a snapshot with their resume, there might be potential room for legislation here).
3. We just have …

Google has integrated their chat service (Google Talk) with Gmail, enabling users to view their chat histories from the Gmail interface. This, of course, dispels any question over whether Google archives one’s chat history, and opens the door to the scanning of the content of your chats in order to place “relevant” advertising.

Following up on the earlier story about the new Apple iTunes MiniStore feature that collects and sends user data to Apple, Cory Doctorow reports that iTunes now asks for explicit user consent before activating this feature:
The MiniStore was switched on by default, without any notice that this service was collecting your information, nor which information was being collected, nor what Apple did with this information.
The new version of the iTunes 6.0.2 installer pops up this screen before turning on the MiniStore:

The iTunes MiniStore allows you to discover new music and …