The Canadian comedy troupe Cynically Tested has posted an Internet short on YouTube featuring "Emily of the State," a satirical look at how ISPs could enable government surveillance of one's online activities through a "helpful" avatar, Emily: YouTube - Emily…
Read More Emily of the State, your friendly Internet surveillance avatar
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
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…
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
Not content with the "limited scope" of collecting phone records on every citizen, the NSA wants to start mining personal data from social networking sites like MySpace, coupled with the intelligence of the semantic web, to help build even stronger…
On June 3, I will be attending this workshop on Data Surveillance and Privacy Protection hosted by Harvard University's Center for Research on Computation and Society: Although there has been significant public attention to the civil liberties issues of data…
A Skype user over at Grain of Salt has discovered an interesting caveat in the "To whom does Skype transfer Your personal information?" section of their privacy policy: Except as provided below, Skype shall not sell, rent, trade or otherwise…
Paxx Telecom is promising privacy-assured long distance phone service. Their promises include: Guarantee never to turn over any records to the government or anyone else without a court order... Provide you with a short access number to dial in front…
Read More Paxx Telecom: Privacy-assured Long Distance Phone Service
[I am one of the organizers the following graduate student symposium to be held this fall at NYU] CALL FOR PAPERS Identity and Identification in a Networked World: A Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium When: September 29-30, 2006 Where: New York…
Read More CFP: Identity and Identification in a Networked World Graduate Student Symposium
Bruce Schneier has an excellent essay on the Eternal Value of Privacy in Wired. Highlights include: The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures…
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