USA Today has an article on the depth and breadth of personal information mined by online service providers, such as Microsoft's Hotmail free e-mail service, in order to provide marketers with highly detailed consumer profiles: Data miners dig a little…
Tag: Data Aggregation
Template for News Stories on Government Data Gathering
Given the increased frequency of revelations about government data gathering and surveillance stories, Dan Solove has created a quick and easy template to help news outlets report on these stories: Under a top secret program initiated by the Bush Administration…
Read More Template for News Stories on Government Data Gathering
Who Needs ChoicePoint when you have First Data
I used to work in the electronic payment processing industry, and was amazed at the amount of purchasing data that passed through our systems on a daily basis. My company was in a top 10 processor, with First Data Corp…
AP: Police Bypassed Subpoenas, Got Phone Data From Brokers
Why should you be concerned about the aggregation and commercial availability of your personal information? Because you have little Constitutional protection from the state accessing such "third party" data, as this AP report makes all to clear: Numerous federal and…
Read More AP: Police Bypassed Subpoenas, Got Phone Data From Brokers
Google, Microsoft and Others Establish Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum
A group of twelve notable and diverse U.S. companies are joining forces to create a Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum to study the implications and explore support for comprehensive federal consumer privacy legislation. Google, one of the signatories, has posted the…
Read More Google, Microsoft and Others Establish Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum
Create Your Own False Identity
Lifehacker links to a useful tool for obfuscating personal data entered in (non-vital) registration forms online, the False Identity Generator: The False Identity Generator is a simple, web-based tool that generates a random first and last name, a valid city,…
Mine Data Not Details
Wired News is carrying an AP report of the workshop on the Data Surveillance and Privacy Protection I attended at Harvard University’s Center for Research on Computation and Society a few weeks ago, where a common theme was coming up…
Balkin: The Public Private “Handshake” and the National Surveillance State
My greatest concern about the collection of personal information by search engines, web 2.0 services, transportation systems and the like isn't that certain individual companies happen to own a slice of my data, nor that these slices are increasingly being…
Read More Balkin: The Public Private “Handshake” and the National Surveillance State
Obfuscation as a Solution to Web 2.0 Data-Mining Threat
Alice Marwick provides useful thoughts on the privacy and data-mining issues surrounding the sharing of personal data on Web 2.0 apps. She shares three common "solutions" to the "problem" of teenagers' divulgence of personal information: 1. Young people should stop…
Read More Obfuscation as a Solution to Web 2.0 Data-Mining Threat
Advertisers Data-Mining on MySpace
Chris Hoofnagle is attending the Ad:Tech San Francisco conferences on new advertising technologies, where he has found "several trends that have serious privacy implications." Among these is the gathering data from social networking sites like Friendster and Myspace for marketing…
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