A few years ago I was privileged to attend the Graduate Student Workshop on Values in Computer and Information System Design, hosted by Geoffrey Bowker and Helen Nissenbaum, at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University.…
Read More Graduate Student Workshop: Values in Computer and Information System Design
Creative Commons recently celebrated its fifth birthday, and Larry Lessig announced some exciting developments (borrowing from his post): Current TV will start integrating CC licenses into their citizen created content system. CC0: CC will be releasing a beta protocol to…
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a new report on online privacy called Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency. The report covers a wide array of issues, ranging from the privacy…
Read More Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency
"Computing in the cloud" has been described as a paradigm shift where data processing and other computer activities are moved away from personal computers or an individual server to a “cloud” of computers on the Internet. Examples include Yahoo Mail…
Read More Computing in the Cloud? I’ll Keep my Data, Thank You
Google has just announced Knol (as in a unit of knowledge) that will encourage people who are knowledgeable about a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. It seems Google wants knols to replace the Wikipedia results that…
Read More Google Knol: Wikipedia with a Splash of Advertising and a Twist of Web 2.0
As previously discussed, Ask.com has launched AskEraser, a new service which promises to protect user privacy by, upon request, deleting users' search activity from Ask.com servers. Ask has put together quite an extensive help page explaining the details of AskEraser,…
Google has launched a new (Internet Explorer) version of the Google Toolbar (with the now-obligatory YouTube video). A key change in this version is the ability to save all your Google settings online, and then log into toolbar on remote…
Read More New Google Toolbar Makes Logging User Data Even Easier
James Grimmelmann has an excellent post arguing that Blockbuster's participation in Facebook's Beacon Web tracking advertising service violates the Video Privacy Protection Act, one of the few federal privacy laws on the books in the U.S. James concludes: "Facebook and…
Read More Does Facebook’s Beacon Violate the Video Privacy Protection Act?
The Yale Information Society Project held the Reputation Economies in Cyberspace symposium this weekend at Yale Law School. The speakers' position papers are available here, and various participants' notes have been posted on the conference wiki. The conference has also…
The Wall Street Journal and others point to today's apology by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for the Beacon fiasco. However, rather than apologizing for creating a pervasive tool for tracking and collecting user purchasing habits across the Web, or for making…
Read More Facebook Apologizes (Sorta); Creates Global Opt-Out (Supposedly)
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