The Montreal Gazette has a feature story on how the combination of cellphone cameras and the World Wide Web has resulting in the rise of "cyber-shaming" - a new kind of public shaming for wrongdoers, from litterbugs and bad drivers…
Read More All Eyes On You: Cellphone cameras & cyber-shaming
A federal judge ruled that the police must stop the routine videotaping of people at public gatherings. Reversing (and clarifying) an earlier ruling, the judge stated that such public surveillance is allowable only if there was an indication that unlawful…
Read More Judge Restricts New York Police Surveillance of Public Spaces
27B Stroke 6 outlines four important pieces of privacy-protecting legislation that have either been recently introduced or received new life in the Democratically-controlled House of Representatives: * The Prevention of Fraudulent Access to Phone Records Act, introduced by Dingell and…
Read More House Introduces Privacy Bill Foursome…With One Runt in the Litter
Here's a chilling first-person account of a university professor who was asked to stop using the anonymizing network software, Tor. University IT and campus security staffers came knocking on Prof. Paul Cesarini's door asking why he was using Tor, and…
BBC columnist Bill Thompson warns readers that new DRM technology, especially that found in Vista, is damaging the freedoms that the Internet was based on: The freedom of expression that was once available to users of the Internet Protocol is…
MIT's Technology Review has a brief article about advances in zoom technology for cellphone cameras. This adds a new dimension to the privacy and surveillance threats cellphone cameras pose. We experienced a major advancement in camera zoom technology around the…
Read More Cellphone Cameras That Zoom…What would Warren & Brandeis Think?
Two years ago I blogged about a very chilling precedent from an upstate New York federal judge who ruled that police can secretly attach Global Positioning System (GPS) devices to a suspect’s vehicle without a warrant, stating that suspects had…
Read More Another Court Ruling on GPS Tracking without Warrant
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that TiVo is collecting and selling data on what parts of broadcasts people are rewinding for review and what commercials they are skipping. Dubbed "StopWatch," this data-collection practice reflects the growing ease with which various…
Here's a slick video by some German students about privacy concerns with Google's ability to collect personal information. Little heavy on conspiracy theories (Google DNA?), and totally lacking in any theoretical analysis (that's what my dissertation is for), but nice…
Pandia Search Engine News reports that the Norwegian Data Inspectorate, whose role is to protect persons from violation of their right to privacy through the processing of personal data, is investigating Google's information collecting practices. From Pandia's report: “Why do…
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