In celebration of Choose Privacy Week, the annual initiative of the American Library Association that invites the public into a national conversation about privacy rights in a digital age, I've written the following guest post for the CPW blog: Toward a set of Best Practices…
Tag: Values in Design
Values in Design of Future Internet Architecture
A central theme in much of my research and advocacy is ensuring attention to ethical values becomes an integral part of the conception, design, and development of information systems. Various frameworks have been developed to help pursue this goal (ie,…
Design and Ethics: Reflections on Practice
I've received a preview copy of an important forthcoming volume, "Design and Ethics: Reflections on Practice," edited by Emma Felton, Oksana Zelenko, Suzi Vaughan. This book marks an important contribution to the growing "ethical design" or "values in design" community…
iConference 2012: The ethical (re)design of the Google Books project
I'm currently in Toronto, Canada for iConference 2012, presented by the iSchools organization, a worldwide collective of 33 Information Schools. The theme of the conference is "Culture-Design-Society", and I will be presenting a paper titled "The ethical (re)design of the…
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Firefox 5 Adds Cross-Platform “Do Not Track”, and Puts it in Privacy Tab
A few months ago Mozilla released Firefox 4, which featured an important "Do Not Track" function which informs websites and advertisers whether you wish to have your activity monitored and collected for behavioral targeting purposes. The problem, however, was that…
Read More Firefox 5 Adds Cross-Platform “Do Not Track”, and Puts it in Privacy Tab
Firefox 4 Adds “Do Not Track”, but Buries It
Mozilla has released Firefox version 4, featuring a new look and feel (Chrome, anyone?), and new privacy and security features. The feature with the most potential -- and the most buzz -- is “Do Not Track,” which "lets you tell…
Google Adds Location History to Latitude: Feature Request, or Strategic Rollout?
When Google launched Google Latitude 9 months ago, they took steps to ensure users' locational privacy was protected. Among the most important privacy-protecting features was the fact that Google didn't keep a log of user locations on its servers; only…
Read More Google Adds Location History to Latitude: Feature Request, or Strategic Rollout?
Google Dashboard: Convenient? Yes. Transparency, Choice and Control? Not so much.
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.
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…
Google Bows to German Data Privacy Demands, but Only Germany
Last month I noted that Google's Street View service was being challenged by German data privacy authorities, who insisted that Google must permanently remove personally-identifying images from their databases (not just blur them in the user interface). Google argued that…
Read More Google Bows to German Data Privacy Demands, but Only Germany
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