Wired News is carrying an AP report of the workshop on the Data Surveillance and Privacy Protection I attended at Harvard University’s Center for Research on Computation and Society a few weeks ago, where a common theme was coming up…
Category: Privacy
Hillary Clinton Calls for Privacy Bill of Rights
My U.S. Senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is calling for the creation of a "privacy bill of rights" to protect people's personal data. From the AP wire: ''Modern life makes many things easier and many things easier to know, and yet…
Riya Moves Ahead with Web Image Search
A few months ago I blogged about Riya, a photo sharing and search site that lets you tag and search images based on facial recognition technology. Users have uploaded over 7 million personal photos to Riya's servers and tagged and…
Balkin: The Public Private “Handshake” and the National Surveillance State
My greatest concern about the collection of personal information by search engines, web 2.0 services, transportation systems and the like isn't that certain individual companies happen to own a slice of my data, nor that these slices are increasingly being…
Read More Balkin: The Public Private “Handshake” and the National Surveillance State
Google Joins NSA’s Other Northwest Neighbors
The NY Times reports that Google has built a "computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky" on the Oregon-Washington border. Yahoo and Microsoft both have large processing centers about…
The Hidden Photos Within Photos
Imagine you're partying with some friends, and you take a photo of the group. Everyone is having a good time, drinking, smoking, etc. You want to post the photo to your Flickr, MySpace or Facebook account, but think maybe you…
Google Wants To Listen In
TechCrunch, among others, is reacting to this post at Google's research blog on a paper [PDF] about "Real-Time Ambient-Audio Identification." The proposed technology would enable your computer to listen to the ambient sounds emitted from your TV, automatically determine what…
Obfuscation as a Solution to Web 2.0 Data-Mining Threat
Alice Marwick provides useful thoughts on the privacy and data-mining issues surrounding the sharing of personal data on Web 2.0 apps. She shares three common "solutions" to the "problem" of teenagers' divulgence of personal information: 1. Young people should stop…
Read More Obfuscation as a Solution to Web 2.0 Data-Mining Threat
Schneier on Contextual Integrity
There is a nice conversation at Bruce Schneier's blog on Helen Nissenbaum's theory of "privacy as contextual integrity." (Full disclosure: Prof. Nissenbaum is my doctoral advisor). Some of the commentors struggle with a proper response to the common "If you…
NSA Wants to Mine MySpace & Semantic Web
Not content with the "limited scope" of collecting phone records on every citizen, the NSA wants to start mining personal data from social networking sites like MySpace, coupled with the intelligence of the semantic web, to help build even stronger…
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