Remember the hard battle fought to convince Google to include a link to its privacy policy on the Google.com homepage? Remember how Google argued “we do believe that having very limited text on our home page is important” and that…
Category: Platforms
Cuil’s Famous Privacy Policy No Longer Protects Privacy
Remember Cuil, the search engine launched in 2008 that was supposed to be a Google-killer? Didn't think so. Anyway, one of Cuil's touted competitive advantages was that it didn't track user search queries. Its original privacy policy (dated July 27,…
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Google Dashboard: Convenient? Yes. Transparency, Choice and Control? Not so much.
Google describes Dashboard as a simple way to view “the data associated with your account”, and that it will provide users “greater transparency and control over their own data.” Elsewhere, Dashboard has been described as a “big concession to users’ privacy rights“, as the answer to the question: “What does Google know about me?”, and as a place providing users “more control over the personal information stored in Google’s databases“. Unfortunately, Google Dashboard is none of these things.
Society of the Query conference: Stop Searching, Start Questioning!
Speaking of conferences in November that I am unable to attend, Geert Lovink and Shirley Niemans at the Institute of Network Cultures have organized the Society of the Query conference, November 13-14 in Amsterdam. With the tagline "Stop Searching, Start…
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The Internet as Playground and Factory: A Conference on Digital Labor
When I edited a special volume of First Monday on "Critical Perspectives of Web 2.0" I was lucky to have included a contribution by Trebor Scholz, which made an already good collection of papers even better. Scholz's article, "Market Ideology…
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IR.10 Internet: Critical (or, why the blog has been slow lately)
For the last 353 days, I've been part of a team planning Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical, the 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). My life is about to get back to normal, as an…
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Banned Books Week 2009: Ignorance is No Armor
Today is the start of Banned Books Week 2009, the 28th annual celebration of the freedom to choose what we read, as well as the freedom to select from a full array of possibilities. Hundreds of books are challenged in…
Google Book Search Privacy Policy Mirrors Web Search, with One Hopeful, albeit Limited, Difference
The proposed Google Book Search Settlement Agreement has been the target of numerous criticisms, not the least of which has been its incredible impact on -- and incredible silence about -- users' intellectual privacy. After pressure by the FTC and advocacy groups, Google published a Privacy Policy for Google Books. In announcing the publication of this privacy policy, Google notes that "Google Books has always been covered by the general Privacy Policy for all of Google's services". Unfortunately, the fact that Google repeats that Google Books will follow the same privacy policy of general Web searching means the norms of data collection of the Web will likely prevail over the norms of the library. All the reasons we are concerned about the privacy of our Web searches are now amplified with the possible emergence of a large-scale infrastructure to track and monitor book searches.
An Objection to the Google Book Settlement by Academic Authors
Dr. Pamela Samuelson has been one of the most vocal, and most intelligent, critics of the proposed Google Book Search settlement agreement. She has written, for example, on how the settlement threatens orphan works and represents a "major restructuring of…
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New Attention to Locational Privacy Threats
Recently, the EFF released a report named "On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever", introducing some of the basic threats to locational privacy: Over the next decade, systems which create and store digital records of people's movements…
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