GPS systems installed on Milwaukee Police squad cars to help dispatchers track officers' whereabouts have recently been found covered with foil, rendering them useless and the cars invisible to monitoring. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports: A Milwaukee police captain was…
Category: Privacy
In Love with Geotagging
The New York Times recently extolled the virtues of using GPS in digital cameras and camera cellphones to "geotag" photos with the location at which they were taken: ...advocates of geotagging, like Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of the photo-sharing Web site…
Cellphone Surveillance
There has been a spurt of media attention paid to the privacy and surveillance concerns of GPS enabled cellphones: GPS Surveillance Creeps into Daily Life (New Standard) Cellphone as Tracker: X Marks Your Doubts (New York Times) Phone service allows…
With ID swipe, Big Brother bellies up to the bar
New Jersey's Star Ledger reports on the rising practice of electronically scanning drivers licenses at bars and liquor stores: It's College Night at KatManDu, a popular Trenton nightclub, and the late-arriving crowd is predictably young. Bouncers pat down male patrons…
The Disciplinary Gaze of Web Search Engines
Blogging has been light (again), as I've been preparing for my final conference trip. This time, I'm in San Antonio, TX for the 92nd Annual Convention of the National Communication Association. I'm presenting on an amazing panel titled "Visualizing Security:…
Intel Drafts Privacy License for Mobile Device Software
On the heels of Microsoft's recent release of privacy guidelines for software developers, here's an excellent example of another company working with privacy scholars to try to protect end-user privacy when using location-based mobile devices. From ComptuerWorld: Intel Drafts Privacy…
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SEM on Search & Consumer Privacy
Gord Hotchkiss, the president of a search engine marketing firm, writes what at first appears to be a thoughtful and reflective essay on how the rise of behavioral targeting within the search engine advertising market (his bread and butter): The…
2006 Election’s Impact on Privacy & Surveillance
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…
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…
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