This San Jose Mercury News article summarizes the privacy and surveillance threats of search engines, focusing on the fact that much of the "massive amounts of data these companies collect, which can include records of the searches you make, the…
Read More What do Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft’s MSN know about you?
Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal has an extensive look at how Google might leverage their acquisition of Neven Vision to help identify and inter-connect users' various web products (blogs, forums, social networking sites, etc) that might not otherwise be…
The Wall Street Journal has published a debate (well, an e-mail exchange) between Kevin Bankston, a privacy lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Markham Erickson, a lobbyist for Internet firms including Google and Yahoo, on the topic of the…
A federal judge in Detroit ruled today that the Bush administration’s eavesdropping program is illegal and unconstitutional. I'll leave analysis of Judge Taylor's reasoning to the experts (Jack Balkin, Orin Kerr, Dan Solove, Eugene Volokh, for starters). But I certainly…
Read More Federal Judge Orders End to Warrantless Wiretapping
The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides these tips to help keep your search history anonymous: How can you help prevent damaging privacy invasions like AOL's data leak? Along with spreading the word about this debacle, you can take steps to protect…
In a quick follow-up to this speculation about Google using Gmail photos to build a facial recognition database, Google just announced they acquired Neven Vision, a company that develops technology to detect and recognize objects and persons in images. While…
The Register warns that Amazon.com is planning to create the "world's biggest personal data stash." Their source is this Seattle Post Intelligencer report on the detailed patent application Amazon filed with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: Amazon.com is developing…
Read More Amazon Plans “World’s Biggest Personal Data Stash”
The Google Operating System blog reports that when uploading pictures for your contacts, Gmail will ask you to crop the picture, to separate the face of the person. The result? Google has a database of multiple images for a lot…
From the EFF: AOL's data leak is a disaster, but there may be some silver lining. By putting the spotlight on the dangers of Internet companies storing massive amounts of private information, the data leak could spur better business practices…
Why was the AOL data dump wrong? "Because it hurts people. It makes them feel defensive about their own thoughts and ideas," says Mary Hodder. She's right.
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