Why should you be concerned about the aggregation and commercial availability of your personal information? Because you have little Constitutional protection from the state accessing such "third party" data, as this AP report makes all to clear: Numerous federal and…
Read More AP: Police Bypassed Subpoenas, Got Phone Data From Brokers
A group of twelve notable and diverse U.S. companies are joining forces to create a Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum to study the implications and explore support for comprehensive federal consumer privacy legislation. Google, one of the signatories, has posted the…
Read More Google, Microsoft and Others Establish Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum
Lifehacker links to a useful tool for obfuscating personal data entered in (non-vital) registration forms online, the False Identity Generator: The False Identity Generator is a simple, web-based tool that generates a random first and last name, a valid city,…
I finally got around to reading The Google Story, by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, the second of two recent popular books about Google. Compared to John Battelle's The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of…
Wired News is carrying an AP report of the workshop on the Data Surveillance and Privacy Protection I attended at Harvard University’s Center for Research on Computation and Society a few weeks ago, where a common theme was coming up…
Ten years ago, after the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nation published a special issue on the National Entertainment State. The issue featured a centerfold chart depicting the tentacles of four colossal media conglomerates that were increasingly…
My U.S. Senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is calling for the creation of a "privacy bill of rights" to protect people's personal data. From the AP wire: ''Modern life makes many things easier and many things easier to know, and yet…
A few months ago I blogged about Riya, a photo sharing and search site that lets you tag and search images based on facial recognition technology. Users have uploaded over 7 million personal photos to Riya's servers and tagged and…
My greatest concern about the collection of personal information by search engines, web 2.0 services, transportation systems and the like isn't that certain individual companies happen to own a slice of my data, nor that these slices are increasingly being…
Read More Balkin: The Public Private “Handshake” and the National Surveillance State
Wired News reports that Reporters Without Borders has labeled Yahoo the "strictest" censor in China: Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said their tests showed that Yahoo.cn blocked a higher percentage of politically sensitive results than Google.cn or the beta version of…
MichaelZimmer.org 
You must be logged in to post a comment.