Wired News is carrying an AP report of the workshop on the Data Surveillance and Privacy Protection I attended at Harvard University’s Center for Research on Computation and Society a few weeks ago, where a common theme was coming up…
Category: Platforms
The National Entertainment State, 2006
Ten years ago, after the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nation published a special issue on the National Entertainment State. The issue featured a centerfold chart depicting the tentacles of four colossal media conglomerates that were increasingly…
Riya Moves Ahead with Web Image Search
A few months ago I blogged about Riya, a photo sharing and search site that lets you tag and search images based on facial recognition technology. Users have uploaded over 7 million personal photos to Riya's servers and tagged and…
Balkin: The Public Private “Handshake” and the National Surveillance State
My greatest concern about the collection of personal information by search engines, web 2.0 services, transportation systems and the like isn't that certain individual companies happen to own a slice of my data, nor that these slices are increasingly being…
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Yahoo ‘Strictest’ Censor in China
Wired News reports that Reporters Without Borders has labeled Yahoo the "strictest" censor in China: Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said their tests showed that Yahoo.cn blocked a higher percentage of politically sensitive results than Google.cn or the beta version of…
Google Joins NSA’s Other Northwest Neighbors
The NY Times reports that Google has built a "computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky" on the Oregon-Washington border. Yahoo and Microsoft both have large processing centers about…
The Hidden Photos Within Photos
Imagine you're partying with some friends, and you take a photo of the group. Everyone is having a good time, drinking, smoking, etc. You want to post the photo to your Flickr, MySpace or Facebook account, but think maybe you…
Google Wants To Listen In
TechCrunch, among others, is reacting to this post at Google's research blog on a paper [PDF] about "Real-Time Ambient-Audio Identification." The proposed technology would enable your computer to listen to the ambient sounds emitted from your TV, automatically determine what…
Google Earth Deafults Google as IE Search Engine
Remember how Google got upset that Microsoft was going to make MSN Search the default search engine in IE7? Now it seems Google is fighting back. When installing the latest beta version of Google Earth on a Windows machine, you…
Obfuscation as a Solution to Web 2.0 Data-Mining Threat
Alice Marwick provides useful thoughts on the privacy and data-mining issues surrounding the sharing of personal data on Web 2.0 apps. She shares three common "solutions" to the "problem" of teenagers' divulgence of personal information: 1. Young people should stop…
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