The Wall Street Journal has published a debate (well, an e-mail exchange) between Kevin Bankston, a privacy lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Markham Erickson, a lobbyist for Internet firms including Google and Yahoo, on the topic of the…
Category: Search Engines
EFF: How To Keep Your Search History Private
The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides these tips to help keep your search history anonymous: How can you help prevent damaging privacy invasions like AOL's data leak? Along with spreading the word about this debacle, you can take steps to protect…
Google to do Image & Face Recognition
In a quick follow-up to this speculation about Google using Gmail photos to build a facial recognition database, Google just announced they acquired Neven Vision, a company that develops technology to detect and recognize objects and persons in images. While…
Gmail Pictures Used For Face Recognition?
The Google Operating System blog reports that when uploading pictures for your contacts, Gmail will ask you to crop the picture, to separate the face of the person. The result? Google has a database of multiple images for a lot…
Preventing Another Search Data Debacle
From the EFF: AOL's data leak is a disaster, but there may be some silver lining. By putting the spotlight on the dangers of Internet companies storing massive amounts of private information, the data leak could spur better business practices…
Because it hurts people
Why was the AOL data dump wrong? "Because it hurts people. It makes them feel defensive about their own thoughts and ideas," says Mary Hodder. She's right.
More (disturbing) AOL profiles
Declan McCullagh at CNet has posted many more, often disturbing, profiles of users gleaned from the AOL search data leak. Examples include: Based on the number of local searches, AOL user 1515830 appears to be a resident of [personal information…
AOL Search Log Profiles Unmasked
It is not that hard to identity actual users from the "anonymous" search data released by AOL. The New York Times quickly found user No. 4417749: No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from…
Will AOL Flap Help Privacy Awareness?
Might AOL's release of the logs of nearly 20 million web searches documenting three months of activity by 650,000 AOL users serve to raise awareness of the privacy concerns with web search surveillance (that I've been writing about forever)? Seth…
AOL’s Apology Misses the Mark
AOL has issued an apology for releasing the logs of nearly 20 million web searches documenting three months of activity by 650,000 AOL users: "This was a screw-up, and we're angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough…
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