Following recent announcements by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook, MySpace has announced it will begin targeting advertisements based on users profiles and behavior on their social networking platform. As explained in this NYTimes article: The algorithms make their judgments partly…
Read More Panoptic Sorting on the Rise as MySpace Enters Behavioral Targeting Foray
The ACLU launched the “Surveillance Society Clock” to symbolize how we are fast approaching a surveillance society in the United States. The clock is set at six minutes before the “midnight” of such a dark end to privacy: The reality…
William McGeveran, a professor at University of Minnesota Law School, points to this troubling story about a Florida State professor who made each student read aloud his/her Facebook profie, which noted how "the girls [sic] whose hobby was “being slutty”…
One of my duties at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School has been to organize our weekly lunch speaker series. Last week we welcomed Samir Chopra, a philosopher who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer…
Paul Neuhaus, a reference librarian at Santa Clara University, has assembled a wiki of state laws on the confidentiality of library records. This is a great resource providing instant access to the relevant statutes, such as New York's: New York…
Read More Wiki of State Laws on the Confidentiality of Library Records
The social networking site Facebook is planning to to enter the behavioral targeting game, letting marketers customize their ads for the millions of Facebook customers who visit the site daily. Given the "mountain of information" users openly divulge on the…
Read More Facebook to Join Behavioral Targeting Game, and Might Win
The Center for Information Policy Leadership recently published a nice framework (PDF) for creating a multi layered privacy notice, whose benefits they outline in the introductory paragraph: Experts agree that good privacy begins with effective transparency. Transparency requires privacy notices…
From Wired's Ryan Singel: The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.…
Read More FBI’s DCSNet Electronic Surveillance System Exposed
Given the obvious privacy concerns with Google's Street View imaging system (as well as Microsoft's Windows Live Local Virtual Earth), you would think providers of such services would make it easy for privacy-threatening content to be flagged and removed. While…
I am unable to reconcile an inconsistency between the common appeal search engines make that data retention laws require them to store user search query histories, and what these laws (where enacted) actually require. For example, this post at Google's…
Read More Does the EU Data Retention Directive Apply to Search Query Data?
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