Wired details the potential impact the Democratic takeover of Congress will have on technology devopment, use and policy. Specific attention is paid to privacy and surveillance technologies: [I]t's unlikely that Democrats -- facing a presidential election in 2008 and fearful…
Category: Issues
Google to Support User Data Portability?
In an interview at the Web 2.0 conference, Googel CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned that Google would like users to be able to have portability with their search history data: Schmidt said he would like users to be able to export…
Discipline & Punish: The Game
I sat in on a fascinating panel on surveillance in MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual meeting in Vancouver last week: DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: THE GAME ABSTRACT: This panel brings together…
Recovering…in Vancouver
Blogging has been light again lately as I've been recovering from my extended European tour (which included a terrible cold mid-way through, unhelped by Europe's restrictions on cold medication available over-the-counter). Here's a quick summary: I presented at the Social…
Airline Passenger Profiling for Profit
Bruce Schneier discusses an article (subscription required) about a start-up company called Jetera, who plans to combine people's flight data with their financial & credit data in order to create in-flight personalization as well as pre- and post-flight mailings and…
Privacy Pitfalls in No-Swipe Credit Cards
A NYTimes article notes the various privacy concerns with contactless credit cards whose data is relayed by RFID without need of a signature or physical swiping through a machine. Incredibly, cards are being deployed without any encryption (contrary to what…
# Privacy: Search Engine Privacy Standard Proposed
Virante, a SEO & Internet marketing company, has propsoed a new privacy standard to prevent search engines from tracking certain search queries. The standard is called #Privacy, and is pretty simple: “Pound Privacy” is a campaign to create the first…
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YouTube shared user data with studio lawyers
In what really shouldn't be that big a surprise, it has been reported that YouTube provided personal information about a user to a Hollywood film studio: On May 24, lawyers for Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures convinced a federal judge in…
Microsoft Releases Guidelines for Customer Privacy
Microsoft publicly released a 49-page internal document, called Microsoft’s Privacy Guidelines for Developing Software Products and Services outlining recommendations for both Micorsoft and other software developers to help them protect customer privacy when building applications that deal with sensitive information,…
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7 Laws for Privacy-Embedded Internet Identity
Ann Cavoukian, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, has released a whitepaper augmenting Kim Cameron's seven laws of identity with privacy protections: 7 Laws of Identity: The Case for Privacy-Embedded Laws of Identity in the Digital Age (PDF). I'm…
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