privacy
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Huge
What could go right? Charter and Cox are merging. Our home in Santa Barbara is served by Cox. They’re not bad, which is a compliment toward a cable company. But we only use them for Internet. Our “cable” is Dish, and comes off a satellite. Our old apartment in New York was (and presumably still is)… Continue reading
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Mittwoch
More lost privacy. 404 reports that Flock Safety, an automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company, “is building a product that will use people lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches to ‘jump from LPR [license plate reader] to person,’ allowing police to much more easily identify and track the movements of specific people around the country… Continue reading
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Visitations
It's still creepy. World showed off its Orb a few years ago at IIW to approximately no applause at all. A lot seems to have happened since then. Here's what Wired says about it. Such as the "@ username" in the Profile setting. I'm in a group zoom-like conference call (is it a "call"? a "session"? not… Continue reading
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Of possible interest
In reply to the question "Which blog post took the most work?" the answer is From Hollywood Park Racetrack to SoFi Stadium, which spanned 2005 to 2024 and involved taking many dozens of aerial photographs on approach to LAX, doing research, and writing about it, hoping it helps historians along the way. Two angles on one story. Noozhawk… Continue reading
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The Real Intention Economy
As a noun phrase, “The intention economy” first appeared in a Linux Journal column by that title, written by me in March 2006. A few months later, when I became a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, I started ProjectVRM for the purpose of making that economy happen. Six years after that, I wrote this book,… Continue reading
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The Kraken Won
Imagine what would have happened had Martin Winterkorn not imploded, and if Volkswagen, under his watch, had not become a datakraken (data sea-monster, or octopus), spying on drivers and passengers—just like every other car company. What would the world now be like if Volkswagen since 2014 had established itself as the only car maker not… Continue reading
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Why selling personal data is a bad idea
This post is for the benefit of anyone wondering about, researching, or going into business on the proposition that selling one’s own personal data is a good idea. Here are some of my learnings from studying this proposition for the last twenty years or more. The business does exist. See eleven companies in Markets for… Continue reading
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If Your Privacy Is in the Hands of Others Alone, You Don’t Have Any
In her latest Ars Technica story, Ashley Belanger reports that Patreon, the widely used and much-trusted monetization platform for creative folk, opposes the minimal personal privacy protections provided by a law you probably haven’t heard of until now: the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA. Patreon, she writes, wants a judge to declare that law (which dates… Continue reading
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Privacy is Social
Eight years ago I was asked on Quora to answer the question “What is the social justification for privacy?” This was my answer. Society is comprised of individuals, thick with practices and customs that respect individual needs. Privacy is one of those. Only people who live naked outdoors without clothing and shelter can do without… Continue reading
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On digital distance
In July 2008, when I posted the photo above on this blog, some readers thought Santa Barbara Mission was on fire. It didn’t matter that I explained in that post how I got the shot, or that news reports made clear that the Gap Fire was miles away. The photo was a good one, but it… Continue reading
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Because We Still Have Net 1.0
That’s the flyer for the first salon in our Beyond the Web Series at the Ostrom Workshop, here at Indiana University. You can attend in person or on Zoom. Register here for that. It’s at 2 PM Eastern on Monday, September 19. And yes, all those links are on the Web. What’s not on the Web—yet—are all… Continue reading
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The Empire Strikes On
Twelve years ago, I posted The Data Bubble. It began, The tide turned today. Mark it: 31 July 2010. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. It has ten… Continue reading
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Is there a way out of password hell?
Passwords are hell. Worse, to make your hundreds of passwords safe as possible, they should be nearly impossible for others to discover—and for you to remember. Unless you’re a wizard, this all but requires using a password manager.† Think about how hard that job is. First, it’s impossible for developers of password managers to do… Continue reading
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Just in case you feel safe with Twitter
Just got a press release by email from David Rosen (@firstpersonpol) of the Public Citizen press office. The headline says “Historic Grindr Fine Shows Need for FTC Enforcement Action.” The same release is also a post in the news section of the Public Citizen website. This is it: WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Norwegian Data Protection Agency today fined Grindr $11.7 million following… Continue reading
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We’ve seen this movie before
When some big outfit with a vested interest in violating your privacy says they are only trying to save small business, grab your wallet. Because the game they’re playing is misdirection away from what they really want. The most recent case in point is Facebook, which ironically holds the world’s largest database on individual human… Continue reading
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The GDPR’s biggest fail
If the GDPR did what it promised to do, we’d be celebrating Privmas today. Because, two years after the GDPR became enforceable, privacy would now be the norm rather than the exception in the online world. That hasn’t happened, but it’s not just because the GDPR is poorly enforced. It’s because it’s too easy for… Continue reading
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On humanity, surveillance and coronavirus
Just learned of The Coronavirus (Safeguards) Bill 2020: Proposed protections for digital interventions and in relation to immunity certificates. This is in addition to the UK’s Coronavirus Bill 2020, which is (as I understand it) running the show there right now. This new bill’s lead author is Prof Lilian Edwards, University of Newcastle. Other contributors: Dr… Continue reading
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Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act
[21 April 2020—Hundreds of people are arriving here from this tweet, which calls me a “Harvard researcher” and suggests that this post and the three that follow are about “the full list of the issues, exploits, oversights, and dubious choices Zoom has made.” So, two things. First, while I run a project at Harvard’s Berkman… Continue reading
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Going #Faceless
Facial recognition by machines is out of control. Meaning our control. As individuals, and as a society. Thanks to ubiquitous surveillance systems, including the ones in our own phones, we can no longer assume we are anonymous in public places or private in private ones. This became especially clear a few weeks ago when Kashmir Hill (@kashhill)… Continue reading