ComputerWord reports that the government was approached by the data-aggregation firm Acxiom to conduct widespread surveillance of web sites discussing topics such as “abortion, racial superiority, politics, religion, immigration, and foreign affairs,” using technology designed to extract business contact information…
Read More Federal Government Considered Web-surveillance Project
The New York Times reports that the State of Indiana is considering selling their major toll road to a private company (a Spanish-Australian partnership) that would operate the toll road for a profit for the next 75 years. The privatization…
Adam Fields has an excellent post discussing why you should be concerned about the fact that your IP address can (and likely is) being tracked by online companies, such as Google. This is such an important topic, I will provide…
Helen Nissenbaum (NYU; my dissertation chair) and Ed Felton (Princeton) are co-organizing an interdisciplinary Workshop on Spyware at NYU on March 16-17. The lineup of speakers reflects a range of viewpoints on technical, legal, and policy aspects of the spyware…
I recently received an e-mail from a reader of this site saying "Privacy is gone. Thank you for your efforts to preserve it." Kind words, and I thanked the writer. However, the writer's e-mail "signature" included the his/her full name,…
Here are more good analyses of the DOJ/Google spat:John Batelle thinks (correctly, IMO) this is more about Google protecting trade secrets than its users' privacy.Dan Solove has two important posts related to the broader issues of commerical data aggregation (and…
This New York Times editorial gets it right about what's really at stake with the DOJ v. Google case:...Protecting minors from the nastier material on the Internet is a valid goal; the courts have asked the government to test whether…
To get a better sense of how michaelzimmer.org is being utilized, I have decided to experiment with a StatCounter counter. This was a difficult decision, being that StatCounter utilizes web cookies to help provide information about what IP addresses access…
Read More Experimenting with a “StatCounter” counter on michaelzimmer.org
Bruce Schneier points to an amazing article by Tom Owad, "Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists". In it, Owad reveals how simple it can be to use data mining techniques to profile people based on their public Amazon…
Read More Schneier on Security: Data Mining and Amazon Wishlists
danah boyd has an excellent post on the recent Seigenthaler-Wikipedia controversy, focusing particularly on the academic community's response: What pissed me off more was how the academic community pointed to this case and went “See! See! Wikipedia is terrible! We…
Read More danah boyd on the Seigenthaler-Wikipedia Controversy
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