Group items tagged

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 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.

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.

This article touches on a lot of the topics that keep surfacing in our classroom discussions about narcissism and how we use social media to communicate with others and share our own identities. It also expresses some of the concerns that I am often torn about; how much privacy can we have if we are going to use this technology, and why aren't we more aware of it.

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

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?

Another mind-blowing example of technology seeping into every aspect of our lives. I'm not sure whether to say it's cool or creepy, but expect "iPavement" would be wonderful material for a SNL skit. The article suggests some practical and helpful uses intended with this innovation, such as emergency alerts and updates. But it may also quickly slip down the slope to push advertisements and break privacy barriers ever farther.

Interesting in terms of issues of ownership. Once our identities are "published" online, who owns them? Who "owns" our search histories? Google owns most of mine, I'd say, but it also allows me to supposedly delete items. Are our search histories too public now to be hidden? And who ever said we had a right to privacy on the world wide web? It does seem contradictory to the nature of a "web."

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.

Remember that artist we talked about a few weeks ago, Hasan Elahi, who "actively discloses countless mundane details of Elahi's daily activities" as an experiment in sousveillance? This article from Hydra Magazine argues that Elahi's project, which stems from the artist's ideas that "the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," does not at all interfere with the government's surveillance programs--"it only adds variety to the realm of possible facts that may be invoked when it's your turn to play suspect."

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".

My new favorite Firefox add on that combats all the new privacy stuff unearthed about the big internet titans.

Lawmakers are finally putting a stop to this practice. Since we broached the topic of rhetorical strategies in making arguments in class, the argument one law expert makes is interesting: ""It lays down boundaries on what you can and can't do. It takes a gray area and makes a bright line ... The bill is a win for employees who want to protect their data security and their personal content passwords. But it's also a win for employers. ... Employers don't want to have access to this content. With access comes responsibility."

This is the latest update on The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act

There have been a lot of posts about web tracking in light of the recent changes in Google. This is an interesting article, but one of the things I like the best is the Collusion display of who's tracking your data.

Keeping track of passwords is definitely a hassle for most of us, so a service that groups all of them didn't seem far off. It will be interesting to see how this develops, and if it will catch on and be secure.

This is an article that responds to some of the issues brought up last class (March 20) about employers asking for facebook passwords.

A little late in the game, but the wording here is really interesting because the censorship of bloggers by the Chinese government includes works with imagined information. In addition, they specifically cut off the comments option. We have a direct moment here where the 2.0 and call and response of online writing is considered poisonous to government action, even if the work is a fictional piece. The most important thing to note here is that China is now requiring all microbloggers to use their real names. We talked about how useful a tracked name can be, but in this case practicality loses over privacy.

This title made me think, "Duh," but apparently 8% of survey participants thought that posting photos or videos of other people without consent should be illegal. One person said the issue "should be regarded the same as it is for printed materials." Another person pointed out that it's actually illegal to record people without their permission, but that photos/video taken in a public setting tend to fall under public domain. I usually create a private folder and then let the people in the photos review them and consent to my publishing them first. What do you think?