The NY Times reports that Google has built a "computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky" on the Oregon-Washington border. Yahoo and Microsoft both have large processing centers about…
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The Hidden Photos Within Photos
Imagine you're partying with some friends, and you take a photo of the group. Everyone is having a good time, drinking, smoking, etc. You want to post the photo to your Flickr, MySpace or Facebook account, but think maybe you…
Google Wants To Listen In
TechCrunch, among others, is reacting to this post at Google's research blog on a paper [PDF] about "Real-Time Ambient-Audio Identification." The proposed technology would enable your computer to listen to the ambient sounds emitted from your TV, automatically determine what…
Google Earth Deafults Google as IE Search Engine
Remember how Google got upset that Microsoft was going to make MSN Search the default search engine in IE7? Now it seems Google is fighting back. When installing the latest beta version of Google Earth on a Windows machine, you…
Obfuscation as a Solution to Web 2.0 Data-Mining Threat
Alice Marwick provides useful thoughts on the privacy and data-mining issues surrounding the sharing of personal data on Web 2.0 apps. She shares three common "solutions" to the "problem" of teenagers' divulgence of personal information: 1. Young people should stop…
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Schneier on Contextual Integrity
There is a nice conversation at Bruce Schneier's blog on Helen Nissenbaum's theory of "privacy as contextual integrity." (Full disclosure: Prof. Nissenbaum is my doctoral advisor). Some of the commentors struggle with a proper response to the common "If you…
NSA Wants to Mine MySpace & Semantic Web
Not content with the "limited scope" of collecting phone records on every citizen, the NSA wants to start mining personal data from social networking sites like MySpace, coupled with the intelligence of the semantic web, to help build even stronger…
Brin says Google compromised principles in China
First, Google starts to censor results in China, making a mockery of its core values. Then they try to explain it doesn't really matter, since no one is using the censored version of their website. But now that they've cowed…
The Nexus of Intellectual Privacy and Copyright
Alex Cameron has posted a nice essay on "The Nexus of Intellectual Privacy and Copyright" at the ID Trail Mix blog. Its opening salvo: For nearly three centuries since the enactment of the world’s first copyright statute, individuals have been…
Surveillance, Privacy and the Ethics of Vehicle Safety Communication Technologies
For those readers interested in the intersections between privacy in public, locational privacy, contextual integrity, and vehicle technologies, my article "Surveillance, Privacy and the Ethics of Vehicle Safety Communication Technologies" has been published in the journal Ethics and Information Technology…
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