Amazon has remotely removed copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from user’s Kindles while crediting their accounts, indicating that the books were improperly added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have the rights to them. More than just an eBook reader, the Kindle represents the latest cog in Amazon's large-scale infrastructure of intellectual surveillance.
Author: Michael Zimmer
The Ethicist Gets it Right with “A Facebook Teaching Moment”
I'm a big fan of the New York Times Magazine's weekly column, The Ethicist. I'm not a big fan, however, of the column's namesake, Randy Cohen. He is often much too consequentialist for my liking, too simplistic is his ethical…
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Report: Predicting Social Security Numbers from Public Data
About a year ago, at the 2008 Privacy Law Scholars Conference, I read a draft of a paper that, when presented to the conference attendees, left everyone in the room speechless. The paper revealed a major security hole in a…
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Debrief: Computer Ethics/Philosophical Enquiry 2009 in Corfu, Greece
I've returned from the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I presented an early draft of a paper based on my critique of the “Taste, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release. The paper was…
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Draft Paper: “But the Data is Already Public”: On the Ethics of Research in Facebook
[UPDATE: The final paper has been published in Ethics and Information Technology]Next week I will be attending the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I will be presenting an early draft of a paper…
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Google Bows to German Data Privacy Demands, but Only Germany
Last month I noted that Google's Street View service was being challenged by German data privacy authorities, who insisted that Google must permanently remove personally-identifying images from their databases (not just blur them in the user interface). Google argued that…
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West Bend Library Controversy Continues to Escalate
The West Bend library controversy continues to escalate....with calls for book burning and growing national exposure (and, unfortunately, ridicule). Here's the (abridged) history and escalation: [Updated on 6/19/09 to include ABC News coverage, and 7/22/09 to include CNN] 02/15/2009: Ginny…
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Dear Google: Make Security and Privacy the Default in the Cloud
Today, a six page letter was sent to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, asking Google to honor the important privacy promises it has made to its customers and protect users’ communications from theft and snooping by enabling industry standard transport encryption…
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Web 2.0 Theses by Ippolita, Geert Lovink & Ned Rossiter
Geert Lovink, one of the premier theorists of new media and network culture, has posted a set of "Web 2.0 Theses," puncturing the ethos and mythology the surrounds Web 2.0 and contemporary internet fetishism. Here's my quick summary, but I…
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The Laws of Social Networking: Promote Open Flows of Information, Make Privacy Hard
Here is my First Law of Social Networking: social networking sites are incentivized to promote the open and unfettered flow of mountains of personal information. Social networks' ability to make money through contextual and/or behavioral-targeted advertising is dependent on users…
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