Putting it mildly, Facebook has done a terrible job dealing with the myriad of privacy issues inherent with its social networking platform (see, for example, News Feed, Beacon, and indirectly, the TOS debacle). I have frequently called on Facebook to…
Read More Facebook Hires ACLU Privacy Lawyer, Might Actually Address Privacy
Speaking of the need to better educate consumers about digital privacy concerns, today's New York Times features two articles that shed light on two widespread online data collection practices. The article "Online Age Quiz Is a Window for Drug Makers"…
Amateur facial recognition technology is coming to Facebook. Face.com is launching a facial recognition application called Photo Finder to allow Facebook users to search their photos -- and photos of their friends -- to learn, recognize, and tag familiar faces.…
Read More Photo Finder: Automated Facial Recognition on Facebook
Today, Google announced its long-awaited behavioral targeted advertising program. Building from its acquisition of DoubleClick, Google's new ad system -- which it refers to as "interest-based advertising" -- will use cookies to track users across the multitude of sites that…
A couple of stories popped up on my radar this morning related to cellphone privacy: The New York Times has a story on advertisers increasingly collecting behavioral and locational data from consumers' cellphone activities: "Advertisers Get a Trove of Clues…
I'm delighted to announce the launch of a new book series I am co-editing with Laura DeNardis, Ph.D, the Executive Director of the Yale Information Society Project: Information Society Series: An Interdisciplinary Series on Technology, Law, and Society Series Editors,…
Again, the media suggests the "kids these days just don't care about privacy" and that, thanks to online social networking, privacy as a value has disappeared. This time, it's Randall Stross at the NY Times, in a column "When Everyone’s…
Sometime last year, I discovered a Facebook application named "Privacy" that provided insight into the personal information any application can access when a user adds one to their Facebook profile. The application prodded users to be concerned about how much…
Read More What Happened to the Facebook Application “Privacy”?
MIT Technology Review has a brief article highlighting recent research activities in achieving protocols to enable privacy-preserving data mining. The article's focus is a paper by Andrew Lindell, which he recently presented at Black Hat. From the article: Lindell is…
Read More How to Share without Spilling the Beans: Towards Privacy-Preserving Data Mining
We are frequently confronted with examples and rhetoric that people's stated privacy preferences don't match up with what they do in practice. For example, see Adam Thierer's recent post, where he provides thoughts from Nick Carr, Bruce Schneier, and Jim…
Read More Privacy Trade-offs: Do People Not Care, or Simply Not Know?
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