Google announced today they are changing the expiration date of their cookie from 2038 (the latest possible date) to a rolling 2 year period. Once put into action, users who visit Google today, for example, will receive a cookie that…
Read More Google’s Cookie to have 2 Year Expiration (Because it is of little value after that time)
Google's Peter Fleischer is (again) trying to provide justifications for Google's retention of users' search activities. He (again) is misleading. I don't have a lot of free time right now for an in-depth response, (my analysis is here) which is…
Read More More of Peter Fleischer Misleading on Google Data Retention
In my dissertation I outline the quest for the “perfect search engine” – a search engine capable of indexing all available information and providing fast and relevant results. The perfect search engine will have to have “perfect reach” to deliver…
Read More With SmartAds, Yahoo Finally Joins Google…as a Threat to Privacy
Researchers at Cornell University's Center for Hospitality Research have released a study on consumer reactions to the common practice in the hospitality industry to collect, aggregate, and use customer's personal data. From the abstract: Data-Driven Ethics: Exploring Customer Privacy in…
I recently had the pleasure of attending an excellent workshop on "privacy advocacy" hosted by the Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley. The goal was to get privacy advocates in the room with academics who work on privacy in…
Jeremy Hunsinger points to this disturbing report about how a dean of students at a Washington high school thought he saw two girls kissing, so he checked the school's surveillance footage to confirm it. He then proceeded to share what…
Read More Function Creep 101: Surveillance Cameras and Social Norms
Continuing the theme of libraries, privacy, and intellectual freedom from a few weeks ago, two items popped up in my blogroll today: Wired's Threat Level tells an incredible story about the plight of two Connecticut librarians who received national security…
Read More A Bit More on Libraries, Privacy, and Intellectual Freedom
Seth Finkelstein has a thoughtful piece on Google and privacy in the Guardian, which includes this insight: The lack of substantive knowledge about Google's actions, combined with general concerns regarding how its logs could be abused, makes it difficult to…
There continues to be quite a bit of buzz and concern about Google's “Street View” enhancement for Google Maps. A couple of comments on recent developments: ::: I don't want to be picky, but given all the (necessary) attention given…
Related to my earlier mention of the challenges of relying on Panoptic theory to talk about surveillance, Anders Albrechtslund has posted an informal taxonomy of "21 perspectives on surveillance": The Big Brother perspective Surveillance is a scary way for the…
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