Nick Carr excerpts Web 2.0 guru Tim O'Reilly's commencement speech at the Berkeley School of Information, where he seems to pull back from his typical Web 2.0 hype: If history is any guide, the democratization promised by Web 2.0 will…
Category: Values In Design
Understanding how ethical values are embedded in technology, and working to ensure values are considered in technology design practices.
Google to Rank Results Based on Domain Name Information?
Search Engine Watch speculates that Google might start using WHOIS information in their ranking of web pages. A recent patent application filed by Google, Information retrieval based on historical data, hints at the possible use of domain information in the…
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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…
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…
The State of Web 2.0
Web 2.0 proponent Dion Hinchcliffe evangelizes about the virtues of Web 2.0: Invariably, Web 2.0 is a term you love to hate or hate to love but either way, you'll know you'll get folk's attention by saying it. I've been…
NYC24 Issue on Privacy
The Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University publishes a biweekly news magazine called NYC24. The current issue is on privacy:With 8 million people crammed into 321 square miles, privacy in New York City has always been a rare –…
Oregon considers GPS Tracking Devices in Every Car
The NY Times writes about Oregon's experiments with a per-mile fee system that could replace general gas taxes. By installing GPS location tracking devices in every car, mileage could be tracked and users would have taxes levied on how much…
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Surveillance in Spheres of Mobility
The collaborators at the important "On the Identity Trail" project in Canada were kind enough to ask me to write an essay for their blog. Here is an excerpt:Surveillance in Spheres of Mobility: Privacy, Technical Design and the Flow of…
Google Won’t Let AOL Game PageRank
When the deal between Google and AOL was first announced, I (among others) complained that Google was introducing bias into their search engine results by teaching AOL how to “game” the system in order to optimize the placement of AOL…
Schneier: The Future of Privacy
Bruce Schneier has a fabulous essay on "The Future of Privacy":Over the past 20 years, there's been a sea change in the battle for personal privacy. The pervasiveness of computers has resulted in the almost constant surveillance of everyone, with…
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