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
Dan Solove points to this Salon article that reveals how Google, Yahoo and Microsoft help the Chinese government not only filter out search results that they want to censor, but also help track down the individuals engaging in criticism and…
Read More Should Search Engines Help China Filter & Track Searches?
Bruce Schneier points us to the latest steps the UK is taking to embark on wholesale surveillance of citizens driving on the public roads: Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles…
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
The New York Times finally picks up on this discussion about how some governments are concerned over the detailed images of sensitive sites Google Earth makes available to the public.
I'm late (due to end-of-semester grading) to the discussion of the recent Google-AOL deal. The key points:Google spends $1 billion to gain a 5% stake in AOL;Google offers special promotion and links to AOL (as sponsored links) for searches which…
Read More Bias in Google-AOL Deal; “Unethical,” says Microsoft
Google announced that they are increasing the font size of the AdWords paid search results becuase "The more similar the type, the higher the CTR [click through rate]." You can view the difference: before vs. after. By making the paid…
Noting that "the realities of the world have changed dramatically since the creation of the Air Force in 1947," the US Air Force has released a new mission statement: The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver…
Prompted in part by the recenet story about how your search history could be used as evidence against you in court, Robert Kuttner has a scathing op-ed in the Boston Globe regarding Google and individual privacy rights titled "Google Search…
I'm attending the "Regulating Search?" symposium hosted by the Yale Information Society Project today. The first panel was on "The Search Space," and Robin Sloan, co-producer of the (in)famous "EPIC 2014" movie on "the future history of media," posed an…
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