I am currently attending the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science in Montreal. Earlier today I had the pleasure of participating on a panel I co-organized with Anders Albrechtslund titled, "Ways Knowing Everything About Each Other:…
Category: Privacy
Discussions of online privacy, privacy in public, intellectual privacy, digital surveillance, and the theory of privacy as “contextual integrity”.
Outsourcing Libraries
Chronicles of Dissent points to this troubling story of a county in Oregon that is outsourcing the operation of their (formerly public) libraries to Library Systems and Services (LSSI), a private, for-profit company. LSSI tries to downplay any affect privitizing…
How Google Blew It with Street View
As I just mentioned, Google recently announced plans to blur or otherwise obscure people's faces in the Canadian version of the Street View product. After a brief conversation with my colleague Chris Hoofnagle, I've come to realize that in their…
Catching up – link dump
I've been incredibly busy lately, and need to quickly catch up on some recent items of note: Siva Vaidhyanathan has launched a new blog for his forthcoming book, "The Googlization of Everything"... ...while Cory Doctorow provides his fictional vision of…
Privacy and Quaero’s Quest for the Perfect Search Engine: Threats and Opportunities
I'm in Maastricht today participating in the "Forum on Quaero: A public think tank on the politics of the search engine." In my talk, "Privacy and Quaero's Quest for the Perfect Search Engine: Threats and Opportunities," I call on the…
Read More Privacy and Quaero’s Quest for the Perfect Search Engine: Threats and Opportunities
U.S. Airport Screeners Are Watching What You Read
Everyone seems to have their personal stories about being hassled by increased airport security. Mine centers on a trip from New York to Boston I took a few weeks after 9/11. Airport security pulled me aside at La Guardia, searched…
Panoptic Sorting on the Rise as MySpace Enters Behavioral Targeting Foray
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
ACLU Sets “Surveillance Clock”
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…
Bill McGeveran on Facebook, Context, and Privacy
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”…
ISP Lunch Speaker Series
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…
MichaelZimmer.org 
You must be logged in to post a comment.