I've been incredibly busy lately, and need to quickly catch up on some recent items of note: Siva Vaidhyanathan has launched a new blog for his forthcoming book, "The Googlization of Everything"... ...while Cory Doctorow provides his fictional vision of…
Category: Platforms
Privacy and Quaero’s Quest for the Perfect Search Engine: Threats and Opportunities
I'm in Maastricht today participating in the "Forum on Quaero: A public think tank on the politics of the search engine." In my talk, "Privacy and Quaero's Quest for the Perfect Search Engine: Threats and Opportunities," I call on the…
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Panoptic Sorting on the Rise as MySpace Enters Behavioral Targeting Foray
Following recent announcements by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook, MySpace has announced it will begin targeting advertisements based on users profiles and behavior on their social networking platform. As explained in this NYTimes article: The algorithms make their judgments partly…
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Bill McGeveran on Facebook, Context, and Privacy
William McGeveran, a professor at University of Minnesota Law School, points to this troubling story about a Florida State professor who made each student read aloud his/her Facebook profie, which noted how "the girls [sic] whose hobby was “being slutty”…
ISP Lunch Speaker Series
One of my duties at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School has been to organize our weekly lunch speaker series. Last week we welcomed Samir Chopra, a philosopher who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer…
Update on Quaero Forum
The program for the "Forum on Quaero: A public think tank on the politics of the search engine" has been posted online (along with a promotional flyer): Quaero: isn’t that the search engine that former French president Jacques Chirac declared…
Wiki of State Laws on the Confidentiality of Library Records
Paul Neuhaus, a reference librarian at Santa Clara University, has assembled a wiki of state laws on the confidentiality of library records. This is a great resource providing instant access to the relevant statutes, such as New York's: New York…
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Facebook to Join Behavioral Targeting Game, and Might Win
The social networking site Facebook is planning to to enter the behavioral targeting game, letting marketers customize their ads for the millions of Facebook customers who visit the site daily. Given the "mountain of information" users openly divulge on the…
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Google to Blur Personal Data on Street View Upon Request — But Requesting Remains Difficult
Given the obvious privacy concerns with Google's Street View imaging system (as well as Microsoft's Windows Live Local Virtual Earth), you would think providers of such services would make it easy for privacy-threatening content to be flagged and removed. While…
Does the EU Data Retention Directive Apply to Search Query Data?
I am unable to reconcile an inconsistency between the common appeal search engines make that data retention laws require them to store user search query histories, and what these laws (where enacted) actually require. For example, this post at Google's…
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