USA Today reports that the NSA has been secretly collecting the phone call records of virtually all American citizens who have recently used a phone, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth: The NSA program reaches into homes and…
Category: Privacy
Page & Brin on (Not) Being Evil
InternetNews has a warm & fuzzy recount of a press event with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin where they provide a lot of doublespeak in response to growing concerns that recent actions by Google violate their "Don't be…
Lauren Weinstein: Concepts for a Google Privacy Initiative
Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People For Internet Responsibility, has written an open letter to Google outlining "Concepts for a Google Privacy Initiative." Highlights include: Increasingly, Internet users are becoming highly sensitized to both perceived and real risks to their privacy…
Read More Lauren Weinstein: Concepts for a Google Privacy Initiative
Sprint Offers Family Locator Cellphone Tracking
Sprint recently launched its Family Locator cellphone tracking program, entering the growing market of GPS-based cellphone surveillance products. Sprint has apparently engaged in value-sensitive design of this service: The child is notified by a text message each time his or…
Search Can Be Your Enemy
CIO.com features this column about how the reach of search engines shatters the myth of "security through obscurity": A month or so ago, I was on the phone with Leonard Fuld, who’s known for his work in competitive intelligence, about…
RFID Guidelines Released
The New York Times reports on a draft of RFID best-practices guidelines that are to be released today: Among other things, the guidelines say that consumers should be notified when goods have radio tags, which can be invisibly buried in…
Peer Surveillance of Pot Smokers at Farrand Field
University of Colorado police have posted online pictures of 150 people (Internet Archive page) smoking pot on the "420" day celebration and are offering a $50 reward for anyone who can identify them. An interesting plea for peer-based surveillance and…
Advertisers Data-Mining on MySpace
Chris Hoofnagle is attending the Ad:Tech San Francisco conferences on new advertising technologies, where he has found "several trends that have serious privacy implications." Among these is the gathering data from social networking sites like Friendster and Myspace for marketing…
PA Bill Seeks to Inform Drivers of Black Box in Vehicles
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a story about a new bill in the Pennsylvania legislature (Senate Bill 1050) that would require car dealers to tell buyers about the existence of automible black boxes and give the car owner greater control over…
Read More PA Bill Seeks to Inform Drivers of Black Box in Vehicles
Microsoft, Yahoo, potatoes and the NSA
I found this commentary about reports that Microsoft and Yahoo are building massive data storage facilities near a large NSA data-mining facility in rural Washington, and thought I should reproduce it in its entirety. It is simultaneously funny and scary:Microsoft,…
MichaelZimmer.org 
You must be logged in to post a comment.