Google describes Dashboard as a simple way to view “the data associated with your account”, and that it will provide users “greater transparency and control over their own data.” Elsewhere, Dashboard has been described as a “big concession to users’ privacy rights“, as the answer to the question: “What does Google know about me?”, and as a place providing users “more control over the personal information stored in Google’s databases“. Unfortunately, Google Dashboard is none of these things.
Tag: Privacy
Madrid Declaration: Global Privacy Standards for a Global World
Today, a collection of international advocates and experts from the academic, consumer, digital rights and labor communities met in Madrid to discuss the future of privacy across the globe. Organized by The Public Voice Coalition, this important meeting precedes the…
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Privads: Privacy Preserving Targeted Advertising
Helen Nissenbaum and others on the PORTIA and PRESIDIO projects have released a white paper describing Privads, a client-side behavioral advertising system designed to protect users' privacy: Online behavioral advertising (OBA) refers to the practice of tracking users across web…
How to Adjust your Facebook Privacy Settings – 2009 Edition
Last year, as part of Milwaukee's 2008 OneWebDay celebration, I posted guidelines to help users adjust their Facebook privacy settings. This has been one of the most visited pages on my blog. Now that we're getting ready for the 2009…
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New book: Contours of Privacy
I few years ago I presented a paper at the “Countours of Privacy: Social, Psychological and Normative Perspectives” conference in Ottawa, sponsored by Members of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research group and their “On the Identity Trail: Understanding the Importance and Impact of Anonymity and Authentication in a Networked Society” research project. I'm thrilled to announce that, after a peer review process and the hard work of David Matheson, a collection of papers from this conference has been published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in an edited volume, "Contours of Privacy".
Report: Predicting Social Security Numbers from Public Data
About a year ago, at the 2008 Privacy Law Scholars Conference, I read a draft of a paper that, when presented to the conference attendees, left everyone in the room speechless. The paper revealed a major security hole in a…
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Dear Google: Make Security and Privacy the Default in the Cloud
Today, a six page letter was sent to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, asking Google to honor the important privacy promises it has made to its customers and protect users’ communications from theft and snooping by enabling industry standard transport encryption…
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The Laws of Social Networking: Promote Open Flows of Information, Make Privacy Hard
Here is my First Law of Social Networking: social networking sites are incentivized to promote the open and unfettered flow of mountains of personal information. Social networks' ability to make money through contextual and/or behavioral-targeted advertising is dependent on users…
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UW-Milwaukee Releases Grade Data to Media; What About FERPA?
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently received 2 years worth of grading data from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. You can search the data here, which provides specific grading details (but not student names or identifiers) for any particular class or instructor…
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Facebook Hires ACLU Privacy Lawyer, Might Actually Address Privacy
Putting it mildly, Facebook has done a terrible job dealing with the myriad of privacy issues inherent with its social networking platform (see, for example, News Feed, Beacon, and indirectly, the TOS debacle). I have frequently called on Facebook to…
Read More Facebook Hires ACLU Privacy Lawyer, Might Actually Address Privacy
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