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: Search Engines
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…
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…
Google & Dell Taking Your Spelling Mistakes to the Bank
It wasn't so long ago that Google was complaining about Internet Explorer 7’s search box will ship with Microsoft’s MSN Search as the default search engine. I, like most commentators, quickly scolded Google for being hypocritical since they enjoy default…
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Google Korea to Log National IDs for some searches
This has the potential to set a disturbing precedent. InfoWorld reports that Google Korea plans to introduce an age-verification system later this year that will restrict adult-themed searches to those 19 years of age and older. Working from a 700-word…
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Libraries vs. Bookstores vs. Google
Library Juice posts a wonderful essay by Tracy Nectoux, a library student at UIUC, who was assigned to visit a bookstore and compare the atmosphere to a library’s atmosphere. I think it's helpful to take the comparison one step further…
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