I've been on vacation the past week, and am now in attendance at the Surveillance Seminar run by David Lyon at Queens University, so I've been offline a bit and out of touch of many recent important events regarding Google…
Category: Platforms
Google’s Peter Fleischer is Dangerously Misleading on Privacy and Personalized Search
I'm supposed to be on vacation this week, but felt compelled to blog about this... There has been increased attention lately about Google's data retention policies and the impact its drive towards personalization might have on user privacy. In response,…
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Google & FeedBurner
I haven't had a chance to think long and hard yet about Google's recent decision to acquire FeedBurner, and I'm sure most reactions will center on how this provides Google yet another medium to deliver contextual ads. But my first…
Completion
I’m pleased to announce that I have successfully defended my dissertation, “The Quest for the Perfect Search Engine: Values, Technical Design, and the Flow of Personal Information in Spheres of Mobility.” Thanks to everyone for their help and support. (blogging…
Lessig on Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur”
Andrew Keen's new book, The Cult of the Amateur, attacks the rise of the “amateur” amid various Internet and Web 2.0 phenomena, and outlines the various harms — economic, social, cultural and political — these amateurs will inevitably cause. I…
Which ISPs Are Spying on You?
Wired has posted the results of their survey of the major ISPs regarding their tracking and data retention policies. I've created a table summarizing the results: How long do you retain records of the IP addresses assigned to customers? Do…
Facebook Allowing Profiles to be Crawled by Google
Remember last fall when Facebook got itself in all kinds of trouble for unilaterally creating and automatically activating "feeds" of its users' changes to their profile pages? They scrambled to try to reign in this privacy-threatening feature, and promised to…
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Amateur Facial Recognition Creeps Closer
The ability for everyday users of search engines to query particular faces is creeping closer. Google OS reports that Google has (kind of quietly) added a feature to their Image Search service to restrict the results to people's faces. For…
Google’s “Street View” and Privacy in Public
About 6 months ago Microsoft launched their Windows Live Local Virtual Earth service, providing street level images of San Francisco and Seattle. You can drive or walk around the map and view the streets and storefronts…and the people. This detailed…
Privacy and Surveillance in Web 2.0: Unintended Consequences and the Rise of “Netaveillance”
[This thought piece appears on the On The Identity Trail project's blog, blog*on*nymity. Thanks to the amazing folks there for the (second) invitation to contribute to the project. -mz] This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts…
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