Michael Zimmer, PhD, is a digital privacy and data ethics scholar at Marquette University
MIT Technology Review has a brief article highlighting recent research activities in achieving protocols to enable privacy-preserving data mining. The article’s focus is a paper by Andrew Lindell, which he recently presented at Black Hat. From the article: Lindell is…
The Dumb Little Man blog reveals how easy it can be to figure out who a person is, where they live, and what their daily routine & activities are by simply searching through public online calendars (like Google Calendar) and…
The latest amateur surveillance and data mining story stars a suburban mom upset about the house being toilet-papered by area teens. She didn’t want to involve the police, so she took the following steps: She canvassed local stores to see…
I’ve blogged about the concerns with commercial data aggregation, the power of data mining, and about how “security via obscurity” no longer applies when databases are online and searchable. Here’s a case showing just how easy it can be for…
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…
Join the UW-Milwaukee Center for Information Policy Research and the UWM Libraries for a special screening of the short documentary film “Big Brother, Big Business: The Data-Mining and Surveillance Industries” in celebration of Choose Privacy Week, an annual initiative of…
Information is leverage. Information is power. Information is Maltego. These are the catch-phrases for a South African company that recently released an affordable, user-friendly data mining tool called Maltego, bringing powerful data-mining technology to the masses. While targeted mostly to…
For some odd reason, the New York Times has an article declaring that data-mining has now gone mainstream: …a wave of sophisticated computing and mathematical analytics that is moving into the mainstream. Fueling the trend are the digitization of information,…
It was recently revealed (confirmed?) that the popular online video diaries of LonelyGirl15 were not authentic, but a publicity stunt of entertainment folks linked to Hollywood talent agency CAA. Today, the real identity of LonelyGirl15 has also been revealed, mostly…
The Volokh Conspiracy reports on a Sixth Circuit decision in a Fourth Amendment case that addresses whether querying a database triggers Fourth Amendment protection. The majority concludedthat it does not: If the government collected the data in the database in…
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