In my dissertation I outline the quest for the “perfect search engine” – a search engine capable of indexing all available information and providing fast and relevant results. The perfect search engine will have to have “perfect reach” to deliver…
Read More With SmartAds, Yahoo Finally Joins Google…as a Threat to Privacy
Researchers at Cornell University's Center for Hospitality Research have released a study on consumer reactions to the common practice in the hospitality industry to collect, aggregate, and use customer's personal data. From the abstract: Data-Driven Ethics: Exploring Customer Privacy in…
I recently had the pleasure of attending an excellent workshop on "privacy advocacy" hosted by the Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley. The goal was to get privacy advocates in the room with academics who work on privacy in…
Jeremy Hunsinger points to this disturbing report about how a dean of students at a Washington high school thought he saw two girls kissing, so he checked the school's surveillance footage to confirm it. He then proceeded to share what…
Read More Function Creep 101: Surveillance Cameras and Social Norms
Google has posted a lengthy explanation as to why they're buying Double Click. Feel free to read it, but here's my thumbnail analysis: Total word count = 2,279 Number of times "consumer" appears = 8 Number of times "money" or…
Read More Google: “Why we’re buying DoubleClick” (sans “privacy”)
Jason Fry, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, writes about the increasing lack of "security via obscurity" as more and more public records become searchable online. While this is old news for many of us, it's nice to see…
Continuing the theme of libraries, privacy, and intellectual freedom from a few weeks ago, two items popped up in my blogroll today: Wired's Threat Level tells an incredible story about the plight of two Connecticut librarians who received national security…
Read More A Bit More on Libraries, Privacy, and Intellectual Freedom
Seth Finkelstein has a thoughtful piece on Google and privacy in the Guardian, which includes this insight: The lack of substantive knowledge about Google's actions, combined with general concerns regarding how its logs could be abused, makes it difficult to…
There continues to be quite a bit of buzz and concern about Google's “Street View” enhancement for Google Maps. A couple of comments on recent developments: ::: I don't want to be picky, but given all the (necessary) attention given…
Related to my earlier mention of the challenges of relying on Panoptic theory to talk about surveillance, Anders Albrechtslund has posted an informal taxonomy of "21 perspectives on surveillance": The Big Brother perspective Surveillance is a scary way for the…
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