Bambi Francisco writes that Google's recent decision to officially censor search results in China violates its core values:It's profound what being a public company can do to the core values of a young firm. was less than two years ago…
Category: Values In Design
Understanding how ethical values are embedded in technology, and working to ensure values are considered in technology design practices.
Google Updates Censorship Policy
Google's official policy on censoring and otherwise altering search results has been updated since their decision to provide censored results for China. The policy can be found at the help page for the question "Does Google censor search results?" The…
Students for a Free Tibet Protest Outside Google
Philipp Lenssen points to this report that a group of people from Students for a Free Tibet gathered in front of the Googleplex to protest against Google bowing to Chinese censorship requests. From SFT's press release:"Students and young people worldwide…
Google Now Officially Censoring In China
Google has officially launched google.cn, a version of its search service designed to appease the Chinese government's desire to block searches related to Taiwanese or Tibetan independence, the Tiananmen massacre, Falun Gong, etc. CNN posted this statement from Google on…
In Google We Trust
Simson Garfinkel has a very timely article in the latest Technology Review titled "In Google We Trust." Garfinkel warns of some of the privacy concerns with Google's Gmail, and calls on Google to respond by implementing privacy-protecting policies and design…
The Value Implications of Paid Search
PSU information science scholar Jim Jansen was guest editor for a special issue of the Bulletin for the American Society for Information Science and Technology on the practice of paid search. Jim was kind enough to ask me for a…
Privacy-Protecting Design of RFID
IBM is demonstrating some new technologies to protect consumers who buy RFID-tagged products, but who want to avoid some of the privacy risks. In this case, the technology would let consumers easily decrease the range that an RFID chip broadcasts,…
Paper: The Value Implications of the “Google Paradigm” for Organizing, Distributing and Accessing Information
I am presenting this paper today at the 6th International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR). The panel is titled "Search Engines - Their Politics; Their Logics":The Value Implications of the “Google Paradigm” for Organizing, Distributing…
Tracking Every Move You Make: Can Car Rental Companies Use Technology to Monitor Our Driving?
Anita Ramasastry's recent columns at FindLaw, Tracking Every Move You Make Can Car Rental Companies Use Technology to Monitor Our Driving? discusses the use of GPS as a monitoring technology, particularly in rental cars. From the article:GPS-Plus-Wireless Transmitters: Why the…
Through the Google Goggles: Sociopolitical Bias in Search Engine Design
Alejandro Diaz, a grad student at Stanford University in Communications (with a BA in Computer Science), has written an excellent (and nearly 200-page) honors thesis entitled "Through the Google Goggles: The Sociopolitics of Search Engine Design" [pdf]. Here is the…
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