About a year ago, at the 2008 Privacy Law Scholars Conference, I read a draft of a paper that, when presented to the conference attendees, left everyone in the room speechless. The paper revealed a major security hole in a…
Read More Report: Predicting Social Security Numbers from Public Data
I've returned from the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I presented an early draft of a paper based on my critique of the “Taste, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release. The paper was…
Read More Debrief: Computer Ethics/Philosophical Enquiry 2009 in Corfu, Greece
[UPDATE: The final paper has been published in Ethics and Information Technology]Next week I will be attending the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I will be presenting an early draft of a paper…
Read More Draft Paper: “But the Data is Already Public”: On the Ethics of Research in Facebook
Last month I noted that Google's Street View service was being challenged by German data privacy authorities, who insisted that Google must permanently remove personally-identifying images from their databases (not just blur them in the user interface). Google argued that…
Read More Google Bows to German Data Privacy Demands, but Only Germany
Today, a six page letter was sent to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, asking Google to honor the important privacy promises it has made to its customers and protect users’ communications from theft and snooping by enabling industry standard transport encryption…
Read More Dear Google: Make Security and Privacy the Default in the Cloud
Here is my First Law of Social Networking: social networking sites are incentivized to promote the open and unfettered flow of mountains of personal information. Social networks' ability to make money through contextual and/or behavioral-targeted advertising is dependent on users…
Read More The Laws of Social Networking: Promote Open Flows of Information, Make Privacy Hard
There's been a flurry of news recently about an article from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University researchers showing that secret questions used to recover forgotten passwords aren't so secret after all. As reported in Technology Review: In a study involving…
Google's Street View product has been criticized by privacy advocates since its very inception, including various posts on this blog. Two years after its release, Google continues to face challenges over its collection and treatment of potentially personally-identifiable images of…
I've written frequently about how the shift from accessing information in offline spaces to online spaces has particular privacy implications. For example, strikingly different privacy norms and expectations emerge when comparing information-seeking activities in libraries vs. bookstores vs. Google Book…
Read More Stutzman: Google exposes Book Search patron records
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently received 2 years worth of grading data from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. You can search the data here, which provides specific grading details (but not student names or identifiers) for any particular class or instructor…
Read More UW-Milwaukee Releases Grade Data to Media; What About FERPA?
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