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…
Tag: Data Aggregation
FBI shows off huge, multi-source linked database
The Washington Post reports on the FBI's new counterterrorism database to help the war on terror: The FBI has built a database with more than 659 million records -- including terrorist watch lists, intelligence cables and financial transactions -- culled…
You Are What You Say: Privacy Risks of Public Mentions
A group of computer scientists from the University of Minnesota recently presented a fascinating paper "You are what you say: privacy risks of public mentions," Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information…
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On Google, User Images and Identifiability
Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal has an extensive look at how Google might leverage their acquisition of Neven Vision to help identify and inter-connect users' various web products (blogs, forums, social networking sites, etc) that might not otherwise be…
Amazon Plans “World’s Biggest Personal Data Stash”
The Register warns that Amazon.com is planning to create the "world's biggest personal data stash." Their source is this Seattle Post Intelligencer report on the detailed patent application Amazon filed with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: Amazon.com is developing…
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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…
More Amateur Surveillance and Data Mining
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…
Others Online: Opt-In Web Surveillance
A new service called Others Online makes obvious what Google Toolbar and other browser tools do in the background: track users web browsing activities. From their site: Others Online is a free toolbar that shows you people relevant to your…
Audit & Remove Yourself from Data-Collection Databases
Wired's 27B Stoke 6 blog has posted some helpful info on how to audit and remove yourself from of some common data-collection databases (and annoying mailing lists): If you have ever applied for health, life or disability insurance on your…
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Tracking Web Users with ClickTale
Fellow PhD student Alice Marwick blogs about TechCrunch's coverage of ClickTale, the latest in website surveillance tools: ClickTale shows you the full story: every mouse movement, every click and every scrolling action. By using ClickTale you will gain insights that…
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