Blogging has been light lately as I'm busy (a) finalizing details for the Identity & Identification in a Networked World symposium at NYU, (b) working out the logistics for my upcoming research trip to Europe (which now also includes a…
Blog
Google Personalized Search: Who Owns the Profiles?
John Battelle repeats an important concern regarding the extensive profiles search engine providers, like Google, are amassing on each user. He quotes Greg Linden's reaction to a Google paper on Bigtable, a distributed storage system: One tidbit I found curious…
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FBI shows off huge, multi-source linked database
The Washington Post reports on the FBI's new counterterrorism database to help the war on terror: The FBI has built a database with more than 659 million records -- including terrorist watch lists, intelligence cables and financial transactions -- culled…
You Are What You Say: Privacy Risks of Public Mentions
A group of computer scientists from the University of Minnesota recently presented a fascinating paper "You are what you say: privacy risks of public mentions," Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information…
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Lauren Weinstein Calls for Search Privacy Working Group
Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People For Internet Responsibility and the moderator of the PRIVACY Forum, has made an impassioned call for the formation of a working group to tackle issue of search engine history data retention, mining and sharing policies:…
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New rule: Car buyers must be told about ‘black boxes’
As a follow-up to this long ago posting, the National Highway Traffic Safety Asministration has passed a resolution requiring car manufacturers to inform buyers if their cars are equipped with event data recorders (EDRs). Car manufacturers must comply with the…
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TrackMeNot Firefox Extension Obfuscates Your Search History
As concerns about the privacy of one's search engine history steadily increase, various solutions have been offered to help avoid the wholesale surveillance and aggregation of one's search queries. While most solutions rely on attempts to cloak one's IP address,…
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What do Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft’s MSN know about you?
This San Jose Mercury News article summarizes the privacy and surveillance threats of search engines, focusing on the fact that much of the "massive amounts of data these companies collect, which can include records of the searches you make, the…
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On Google, User Images and Identifiability
Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal has an extensive look at how Google might leverage their acquisition of Neven Vision to help identify and inter-connect users' various web products (blogs, forums, social networking sites, etc) that might not otherwise be…
WSJ Search History/Privacy Debate
The Wall Street Journal has published a debate (well, an e-mail exchange) between Kevin Bankston, a privacy lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Markham Erickson, a lobbyist for Internet firms including Google and Yahoo, on the topic of the…
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