Data Aggregation – MichaelZimmer.org

NY Times: “Big Data on Campus”

Posted by Michael Zimmeron July 18, 2012in AcademicLeave a comment

The New York Times, in collaboration with the Chronicle of Higher Education, has published an excellent article by Marc Parry on "Big Data on Campus: Colleges Awakening to the Opportunity of Data Mining". The article highlights the growing trend of…

NY Times on Online Data Collection and Sharing

Posted by Michael Zimmeron March 26, 2009in Old Media, Privacy3 Comments

Speaking of the need to better educate consumers about digital privacy concerns, today's New York Times features two articles that shed light on two widespread online data collection practices. The article "Online Age Quiz Is a Window for Drug Makers"…

How to Share without Spilling the Beans: Towards Privacy-Preserving Data Mining

Posted by Michael Zimmeron March 2, 2009in PrivacyLeave a comment

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…

Maltego: Data-Mining Tool for the Masses

Posted by Michael Zimmeron November 25, 2008in Internet, Internet Research Ethics, Privacy1 Comment

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…

Clintons in Relationship with Privacy-Violating Info Broker

Posted by Michael Zimmeron May 26, 2007in Internet, Privacy1 Comment

Hillary Clinton has been touted as the "privacy candidate" for the 2008 Presidential elections, which is certainly a good reason to consider voting for her (not my sole criterion, but one of the top 5). This recent NY Times story,…

NYT Discovers Data-Mining

Posted by Michael Zimmeron May 20, 2007in InternetLeave a comment

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,…

Airline Passenger Profiling for Profit

Posted by Michael Zimmeron October 31, 2006in Privacy2 Comments

Bruce Schneier discusses an article (subscription required) about a start-up company called Jetera, who plans to combine people's flight data with their financial & credit data in order to create in-flight personalization as well as pre- and post-flight mailings and…

I want my Google Data Privacy

Posted by Michael Zimmeron October 13, 2006in Privacy, Search Engines5 Comments

Gene at Fred's House sounds like one of the multitude who are beginning to embrace the "Google lifestyle": I look around my desktop and I see Google Reader, Google Mail, Google Talk, Google Toolbar, Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google News,…

Volokh Conspiracy: Data-Mining and the Fourth Amendment

Posted by Michael Zimmeron September 5, 2006in Information Law & PolicyLeave a comment

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…

Opting Out of Online Data Vendors

Posted by Michael Zimmeron September 5, 2006in Internet, Privacy1 Comment

The Privacy Rights Clearninghouse provides a very useful list of online data vendors along with URLs and instructions to remove your information from their databases.