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The changing privacy policy for Google came up in last class (I think Dibs mentioned it), and I thought this was an interesting article that talks about how difficult it is to navigate around the changes.

These are the kinds of risks today's digital users face without even realizing it. How many of us actually sit down with a site before registering for an account and read through the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy? Or if you do, how far do you get before you're bored to death or completely confused? This kind of stuff terrifies me. But why are we at fault? Does this mean I have to delete my Pinterest account?

A school district in Delaware recently proposed a rule that would require teachers to unfriend students, a district in Maine is banning all social networking, chat sites, forums, and other sites from state-provided laptops, and now the New York City Department of Education will now monitor teachers' interactions with students on professional social networking services. Teachers were warned not to expect any privacy and that administrators and officials should have access to the professional accounts. This makes me wonder if now workplaces and universities will require employees to loosen their privacy settings on their accounts.

For those like me interested in the ramifications of gender, human rights and social policy this is an excellent place to look into. Carol Cohn, one of the foremost gender and warfare scholars is associated with this consortium.

Another shrouding tactic is to use the search engine DuckDuckGo, which distinguishes itself with a "We do not track or bubble you!" policy. Bubbling is the filtering of search results based on your search history. (Bubbling also means you are less likely to see opposing points of view or be exposed to something fresh and new.) *I don't particularly care about my privacy (nothing to hide and honestly don't care whose watching), but I do care about the information being fed to me through search engines. I pride myself on doing all the research I can before supporting or criticizing a position. If google is simply feeding me what I want to hear, how do I know I have the full story? This seems like a particularly nefarious form of censorship--one that makes sense in an age of "truthiness" and pandering to ignorance. Bad google. No bubbles.

According to the Terms & Conditions of Pinterest, all users must have complete ownership of everything they "pin," a condition that completely goes against the purpose of the site, or legal action can be taken against the user. Not only should this article be a wake-up call for Pinterest users (including me), but it is also an interesting addition to the conversations of copyright and ownership/distribution of digital information.

I thought parts of this article were interesting and relevant to the reading we're doing. O'Reilly discussed privacy to some extent in this first half, but, I thought it might be interesting to look at some policy about privacy protection more deeply.

The new Google CEO, who has been on the job for a year talks about the privacy policy which garnered a lot of criticism. Interestingly and not surprisingly, he presents this case a week before the announcement of Google's first quarter earnings

Questions of names and online identity come up in this article, which talks about how Google Plus has changed its policy of requiring people to use their real names when registering for accounts.

This blurb is from the BBC: The new privacy policy is rolling out around the world on 1 March Changes made by Google to its privacy policy are in breach of European law, the EU's justice commissioner has said. Viviane Reding told the BBC that authorities found that "transparency rules have not been applied".

Control that extends far beyond what was discussed in "The Internet Treats Censorship as a Malfunction and Routes Around It?"

A brief article that provides legal background info on the issue.

Jessica Murphy writes: "Eolas's "interactive web" patent being ruled as invalid and Berners-Lee jumping for joy about the ruling."

This was interesting trying to turn off (or "pause") my web history! This kind of stuff creeps me out-how much "web people" know about us and our personal lives.

Going back to an older discussion, I thought some might be interested in this article. It puts forward ideas for how copyright issues could be addressed. The website in full might also be interesting to some.