About 6 months ago Microsoft launched their Windows Live Local Virtual Earth service, providing street level images of San Francisco and Seattle. You can drive or walk around the map and view the streets and storefronts…and the people. This detailed…
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Privacy and Surveillance in Web 2.0: Unintended Consequences and the Rise of “Netaveillance”
[This thought piece appears on the On The Identity Trail project's blog, blog*on*nymity. Thanks to the amazing folks there for the (second) invitation to contribute to the project. -mz] This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts…
Google & Dell Taking Your Spelling Mistakes to the Bank
It wasn't so long ago that Google was complaining about Internet Explorer 7’s search box will ship with Microsoft’s MSN Search as the default search engine. I, like most commentators, quickly scolded Google for being hypocritical since they enjoy default…
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Anti-Sit Technologies
Those familiar with my work know I'm interested in how technologies can embody values, or more specifically, how the design of technologies bears directly and systematically on the realization – or suppression – of social, ethical, and political values, such…
Clintons in Relationship with Privacy-Violating Info Broker
Hillary Clinton has been touted as the "privacy candidate" for the 2008 Presidential elections, which is certainly a good reason to consider voting for her (not my sole criterion, but one of the top 5). This recent NY Times story,…
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Digital Social Responsibility: Searching for Ethics on the Internet (June 7, NYC)
The Japan Society of New York is hosting a very interesting event titled "Digital Social Responsibility: Searching for Ethics on the Internet" on Thursday, June 7, 2007 from 2:00 to 6:00 PM. This seminar will feature keynote speaker Craig Newmark,…
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Police Monitoring MySpace, Case No. 420
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…
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…
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