Privacy Pitfalls in No-Swipe Credit Cards

A NYTimes article notes the various privacy concerns with contactless credit cards whose data is relayed by RFID without need of a signature or physical swiping through a machine. Incredibly, cards are being deployed without any encryption (contrary to what…

Microsoft Releases Guidelines for Customer Privacy

Microsoft publicly released a 49-page internal document, called Microsoft’s Privacy Guidelines for Developing Software Products and Services outlining recommendations for both Micorsoft and other software developers to help them protect customer privacy when building applications that deal with sensitive information,…

Debrief: Social Software and Web 2.0 seminar

I presented at the Social Software and Web 2.0: Critical Perspectives and Challenges for Research and Business seminar and workshop a few days ago at Aalborg University in Denmark. My talk, "The Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0: How Web 2.0…

Security Analysis (and Response) of Diebold Voting Machines

Ari Feldman, Alex Halderman, and Ed Felton released an amazing paper on the security of Dielbold's e-voting technology. The paper is accompanied by a ten-minute video that demonstrates some of the vulnerabilities they've uncovered. Here is the paper’s abstract: Security…

More on Facebook and the Contextual Integrity of Personal Information Flows

There has been an interesting discussion on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list (and across the blogosphere) regarding the addition of feeds at Facebook and the nature of the reaction by its users. Many have criticized the reaction by…

Facebook Changes Cause Rift in Flow of Personal Information

Slashdot reports that Facebook, the college student networking site, launched changes to their web site this morning, provoking a massive and immediate response, and not the one the company had hoped for. Hundreds of protest 'Groups' formed, the largest of…

Registration Open: Identity and Identification in a Networked World

Registration is now open for the "Identity and Identification in a Networked World" multidisciplinary graduate student symposium, September 29-30, 2006 at the NYU School of Law. Twenty graduate students from across North America and Europe will share their exciting research…