The art blog Art Fag City recently published a brilliant and insightful photo essay by Jon Rafman, titled "IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View". Through text and Street View images, Rafman critically interrogates the gaze of Street View, exposing the ways in which it frames our view of the world, while at the same time constraining it. In the post are some of the more compelling Street View images he has found, along with his closing remarks.
Category: Values In Design
Understanding how ethical values are embedded in technology, and working to ensure values are considered in technology design practices.
New book: Contours of Privacy
I few years ago I presented a paper at the “Countours of Privacy: Social, Psychological and Normative Perspectives” conference in Ottawa, sponsored by Members of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research group and their “On the Identity Trail: Understanding the Importance and Impact of Anonymity and Authentication in a Networked Society” research project. I'm thrilled to announce that, after a peer review process and the hard work of David Matheson, a collection of papers from this conference has been published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in an edited volume, "Contours of Privacy".
Google Bows to German Data Privacy Demands, but Only Germany
Last month I noted that Google's Street View service was being challenged by German data privacy authorities, who insisted that Google must permanently remove personally-identifying images from their databases (not just blur them in the user interface). Google argued that…
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Dear Google: Make Security and Privacy the Default in the Cloud
Today, a six page letter was sent to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, asking Google to honor the important privacy promises it has made to its customers and protect users’ communications from theft and snooping by enabling industry standard transport encryption…
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Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Comic
Neil Postman is one of the primary reasons I decided to leave Milwaukee in 2001 and move to New York City to pursue my graduate education. While searching for schools, I had discovered of the department Postman founded at NYU,…
Google Continues to be Challenged on Street View
Google's Street View product has been criticized by privacy advocates since its very inception, including various posts on this blog. Two years after its release, Google continues to face challenges over its collection and treatment of potentially personally-identifiable images of…
Code as Law: Air-L and Twitter @Replies
Speaking of Lessig, two interesting cases emerged this week that help illustrate Lessig's position that, when thinking about the architecture of cyberspace, "code is law." In Code, Lessig argues that all of the rules, tendencies, affordances, and constraints of/in cyberspace…
Google Launches Behavioral Advertising System, With Impressive (But Not Quite Perfect) Privacy Controls
Today, Google announced its long-awaited behavioral targeted advertising program. Building from its acquisition of DoubleClick, Google's new ad system -- which it refers to as "interest-based advertising" -- will use cookies to track users across the multitude of sites that…
Yes, Privacy Does Still Exist in a Facebook World
Again, the media suggests the "kids these days just don't care about privacy" and that, thanks to online social networking, privacy as a value has disappeared. This time, it's Randall Stross at the NY Times, in a column "When Everyone’s…
What Happened to the Facebook Application “Privacy”?
Sometime last year, I discovered a Facebook application named "Privacy" that provided insight into the personal information any application can access when a user adds one to their Facebook profile. The application prodded users to be concerned about how much…
Read More What Happened to the Facebook Application “Privacy”?
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