Michael Zimmer, PhD, is a digital privacy and data ethics scholar at Marquette University
The NY Times reports that when you subscribe to a channel on YouTube, the Google-owned video sharing site publicly broadcasts this fact by putting your user information on that channel's page for anyone to see: Google’s video site lets you…
Read More YouTube: “Broadcast Yourself” means broadcasting your viewing interests for all to see
Video privacy be damned. Louis L. Stanton, a senior judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, issued an order (PDF) Wednesday requiring Google to turn over every record of every video watched by…
Read More Court Orders Google to Give All YouTube User Histories to Viacom
[This thought piece appears on the On The Identity Trail project's blog, blog*on*nymity. Thanks to the amazing folks there for the (second) invitation to contribute to the project. -mz] This post is an attempt to collect and organize some thoughts…
A video honoring the 5th Anniversary of the Media Ecology Association has been posted to YouTube, featuring choice clips of (roughly in order of appearance) Camile Paglila, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman (including his famous stint on Comedy Central's "Daily Show"),…
ASPnews.com reports that Google has complied with subpoenas issued by the U.S. District Court in Northern California and provided 20th Century Fox the identities of two individuals who illegally uploaded entire episodes of "24" to YouTube prior to its broadcast…
Michael Kinsley has an amusing piece in Slate remarking on the fact that since so many people freely provide so much personal information on Web 2.0 and social networking sites, that now, On the Internet, everybody knows you're a dog:…
Read More On the Internet, everybody knows you’re a dog – Slate
The theory of “privacy as contextual integrity" provides the tools for considering how the introduction of new technologies/practices within a particular context might disrupt norms of information flow, potentially threatening values of privacy, autonomy, or liberty. It is especially useful…
In what really shouldn't be that big a surprise, it has been reported that YouTube provided personal information about a user to a Hollywood film studio: On May 24, lawyers for Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures convinced a federal judge in…
In one corner, we have the Googlization of virtually every aspect of our online (and increasingly offline) activities, tracking your every move. In the other corner, we have the increased corporatization of Web 2.0, also interested in watching everything you…
About the only news that could rival North Korea's announcement of a nuclear test is the fact that Google announced its intention to buy YouTube. Not surprisingly, my first reaction is concern over the incredible data-mining opportunity this represents for…
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