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…
Read More Facebook Allowing Profiles to be Crawled by 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…
MIT's Technology Review has a brief article about advances in zoom technology for cellphone cameras. This adds a new dimension to the privacy and surveillance threats cellphone cameras pose. We experienced a major advancement in camera zoom technology around the…
Read More Cellphone Cameras That Zoom…What would Warren & Brandeis Think?
I've been meaning to blog about the discussion at Concurring Opinions regarding the rise of "cyber-shaming" - the act of posting online elements of seemingly private conversations or events that you happened to overhear or witness. Examples include the posting…
Read More Cyber-shaming, Limited Privacy, and Contextual Integrity
The Economist has written a short piece on the theory of privacy as "contextual integrity" developed by my dissertation adviser, Helen Nissenbaum. The article focuses on efforts by John Mitchell, Adam Barth and Anupam Datta, all computer scientists at Stanford…
The theory of “privacy as contextual integrity" provides the tools for considering how the introduction of new technologies/practices within a particular context might disrupt norms of information flow, potentially threatening values of privacy, autonomy, or liberty. It is especially useful…
There has been an interesting discussion on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list (and across the blogosphere) regarding the addition of feeds at Facebook and the nature of the reaction by its users. Many have criticized the reaction by…
Read More More on Facebook and the Contextual Integrity of Personal Information Flows
Slashdot reports that Facebook, the college student networking site, launched changes to their web site this morning, provoking a massive and immediate response, and not the one the company had hoped for. Hundreds of protest 'Groups' formed, the largest of…
Read More Facebook Changes Cause Rift in Flow of Personal Information
There is a nice conversation at Bruce Schneier's blog on Helen Nissenbaum's theory of "privacy as contextual integrity." (Full disclosure: Prof. Nissenbaum is my doctoral advisor). Some of the commentors struggle with a proper response to the common "If you…
For those readers interested in the intersections between privacy in public, locational privacy, contextual integrity, and vehicle technologies, my article "Surveillance, Privacy and the Ethics of Vehicle Safety Communication Technologies" has been published in the journal Ethics and Information Technology…
Read More Surveillance, Privacy and the Ethics of Vehicle Safety Communication Technologies
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