Increasingly, policy are regularly monitoring MySpace pages for evidence of criminal activity. Here's a recent case from near my hometown, as reported in a column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: The 18-year-old Sheboygan guy was so proud of the pot…
Month: May 2007
Personal Data Flows and APIs
On the heels of the Twitter privacy flaw, where users' "protected" data streams are automatically accessible to third parties via their API, Facebook has now been criticized for automatically enrolling all of its users (including me, apparently) in their new…
Videos on Reasonable Expectation of Privacy
The amazing team of researchers at On the Identity Trail project have released two short videos exploring the "reasonable expectations of privacy": The first film, "Tessling-Just the Facts", is a brief dramatization of the facts that gave rise to R.…
Flaw in Twitter’s Privacy Settings
I've just recently started experimenting with Twitter - that sexy new thing that lets users send 140-word messages of what they're doing at any given moment to the world. Some users, of course, prefer to keep the mundane details of…
Libraries and Privacy: Following up with CASSIE
Following up - again - on recent posts on libraries and privacy here and at Chronicles of Dissent, CoD has received a response from the makers of the CASSIE Internet access management system. Excerpts from their e-mail exchange: 1. Can…
MSFT Wants To Identify All Web Surfers Based on Surfing Habits
Not wanting to be outdone by Google's recent news about profiling users based on their psychological profiles, reports have emerged that Microsoft is developing new technologies to identify users based on their browsing habits: IF YOU thought you could protect…
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Libraries and Privacy: Following up with the ALA
Following up on recent posts on libraries and privacy here and at Chronicles of Dissent, CoD contacted Deborah Caldwell-Stone, a Deputy Director at the American Library Association, for reactions of some of the issues we've been discussing. Regarding concerns about…
US high-speed Internet is…slow
Is this the inevitable consequence of privatizing access to the NSFNet backbone? From Press Esc: The average broadband download speed in the US is only 1.9 megabits per second, compared to 61 Mbps in Japan, 45 Mbps in South Korea,…
On the Importance of Libraries
One of the more pleasant unintended consequences of my dissertation research was unearthing how the values of privacy, autonomy, and freedom of inquiry are central to the institution of the public library. I argue that libraries serve as spheres of…
Why Privacy Matters
Rory Litwin at the excellent Library Juice blog suggests three things we can do to remind ourselves why privacy matters: Recall specific occasions in your life when you realized you needed to make some information about yourself more private, or…
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