Blogging has been light due to other duties, but I wanted to point out a few notable items that deserve attention:
- Twitter appears to be planning to expand the search offerings, allowing users to search for particular terms within others’ real-time personal data streams. If implemented, one’s Twitter messages will no longer be practically obscured from most people’s eyes (only a few people really other to view your stream, trust me). Instead, access to your stream is only a search term away.
- Philipp Lenssen posted a nice piece of satire about how protective Google is of all the information it collects about its users. For example, “Your web search history containing your dreams and wishes, and the one time you googled your ex – these are all protected by us” and “The restaurant you looked up in Google Maps last night, and the calendar entry you then added, and the subsequent mail you wrote to Susan. Shhh….”
- An AT&T research paper published in 2001 and unearthed today by Andrew Appel at Freedom to Tinker shows how the phone company uses their own custom software to crunch through tens of millions of long distance phone records a night to draw up what AT&T calls “communities of interest” — i.e., calling circles that show who is talking to whom. As Threat Level reminds us, the FBI has been requesting “communities of interest” records from phone companies under the USA PATRIOT Act without a warrant.
- Ralph Bendrath has two thoughtful posts: First, on Google’s OpenSocial project and the privacy concerns with linking various social networking silos of personal information; and second, regarding the European Network and Information Security Agency’s (ENISA) new report on “Security Issues and Recommendations for Online Social Networks“.
I know I’m forgetting a ton of other items that have popped up in recent weeks. I’ll try to scrub through my Bloglines feeds again soon.
MichaelZimmer.org 