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By Gina Nahai
$11.20
By Celia Chazelle (Editor), Simon Doubleday (Editor), Felice Lifshitz (Editor), Amy G. Remensnyder (Editor)
$22
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apn / Namco Bandai
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By Juan Cole — President Barack Obama is actually siding with police who want to use GPS devices to track you without a warrant. It always disturbed me when on “Star Trek” the captain asked the ship’s computer where a crew member was and was told the person’s exact location.
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Courtesy of Apple
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A new “panic button” cellphone application is being promoted by the U.S. State Department for pro-democracy activists, especially those in the Arab world and China, that wipes out the phone’s contacts and alerts fellow activists.
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Daniel Erwin (CC-BY)
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In the age of oversharing, we take it for granted that our every status is up to date and hanging out for all to see. Privacy, we are told, is dead. But over in Europe, they have crazy new laws that actually restrict how businesses stalk us online. Communists.
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Flickr / Ed Yourdon (CC-BY-SA)
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The Justice Department will ask Congress to make it mandatory for Internet service providers to retain data on their users’ activity. Law enforcement officials already can ask for data to be preserved, but Justice would like to have more robust snooping capabilities in order to investigate and prosecute “almost every type of crime.” (more)
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Martin Luther King Jr.’s “missing” final years, questioning the capacity of our undergraduate graduates, and a new California law that allows cops to snoop our smart phones. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Jan 22, 2011
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twitter.com / wikileaks
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When the Justice Department hit Twitter with a court order demanding the private data of certain users associated with WikiLeaks, the G-men might have expected that the social networking site would wilt like the half-dozen easily bullied companies that have cut off the whistle-blower, but Twitter, in the words of Wired’s Ryan Singel, “beta-tested a spine.” (more)
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Flickr / Ludovic Bertron (CC-BY)
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By Chris Hedges — The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It turns out they were both right.
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Flickr / webtreats (CC-BY)
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By G.W. Schulz, CIR —
Everyone from employers to the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, raising questions about how standards enforcing privacy online can withstand the rush of data about you and everyone else that courses through the Internet.
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Flickr / Rosie O'Beirne
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In a “how in the world can this happen” moment, federal employees have been put on alert after it was discovered that a worker at the General Services Administration sent the names and Social Security numbers of the agency’s entire staff to a private e-mail address, exposing 12,000 people to the threat of identity theft.
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Flickr / Swerz
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Google is back in the privacy hot seat, as Britain’s privacy commission says it will once again investigate the kind and amount of personal information that the Internet search giant gathered from private Wi-Fi networks as its Google Street View cars patrolled.
Posted on Oct 24, 2010
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Flickr / Gauldo
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No matter how strict Facebook users may be with their settings, their bid for privacy can be compromised by third-party software developers who make those annoying apps that let users play games with each other—and, apparently, share their personal information with advertisers.
Posted on Oct 18, 2010
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joindiaspora.com
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The creators of Diaspora are touting their new social network as a privacy conscious, open-source alternative to Facebook, but it’ll take more than good will to win over any of Mark Zuckerberg’s 500 million social drones.
Posted on Sep 16, 2010
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AP / Pat Sullivan
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By T.L. Caswell — Should your car help authorities track you? Should it be a traveling billboard? … Amid emerging technology, the role of the license plate is in flux and causing controversy.
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American Science & Engineering
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By G.W. Schulz, CIR —
While debate continues in the United States over whole-body imagers, manufacturers of the technology are opening deeper opportunities for themselves elsewhere that could make the controversial machines an even bigger part of everyday life.
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If you’ve recently entered the job market (and who hasn’t in the last couple of years), you’re probably familiar with the ritual of sterilizing your Facebook presence and hoping your prospective boss doesn’t find anything juicy. Apparently Germans are sick of potential employers snooping, and a proposed law would put limits on that.
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Wikimedia Commons
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A list of 1,300 alleged illegal immigrants has been given to Utah media and state policymakers—a list that includes individuals’ first and last names, Social Security numbers, addresses, and even pregnancy due dates—and many are looking to a particular state agency as the culprit for the leak.
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Wikimedia Commons / Agência Brasil
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TV, radio and newspaper journalists across Italy are on a 24-hour strike, shutting down news around the country Friday in response to a so-called “gagging law” that intends to shield politicians, like playboy Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, by restricting the capacity of investigators to eavesdrop on suspects and blocking journalists from publishing the results.
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Flickr / cobby17
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Canada’s Ontario province, possibly inspired by the decade-long assault on civil liberties in the U.S., has secretly passed a regulation allowing Toronto police to arrest anyone near the security zone for the upcoming G-20 financial summit who declines to identify himself or herself or submit to a search.
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AP / Jae C. Hong
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Google said it will hand over wireless network data that was collected by fleets of vehicles shooting photographs for the search giant’s Street View mapping service as it tries to resolve a privacy row with European regulators.
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By Ruth Marcus — I’m with Sarah Palin on this one. Her new neighbor, it turns out, is author Joe McGinniss. Coincidence? I think not. McGinniss wrote an unflattering profile of Palin for Portfolio magazine last year, and he’s now writing a book about the former Alaska governor.
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Fake news by Andy Borowitz —
According to the head of the domestic spying operation, China decided to scrap its elaborate array of spy satellites, eavesdropping devices and closed-circuit surveillance cameras after recognizing that Facebook put them all to shame.
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By Ruth Marcus — She’s not gay, OK? Actually, the all-too-public discussion about the ought-to-be private topic of Elena Kagan’s sexuality would be easier if the Supreme Court nominee were gay.
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Flickr / Swerz
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In an announcement following a data audit by Germany’s data protection authority, Google has admitted to accidentally sampling payload data from open Wi-Fi networks as its Google Maps mobiles traversed the globe’s streets.
Posted on May 15, 2010
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Facebook has become something of a privacy nightmare (but then what did we expect when we turned over the social sphere to a private company?). Grumbles aside, here are some quick changes that can keep Grandma in photos without sharing your sexts and pokes with the world.
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google.com / governmentrequests/
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Google has a new service, but it won’t help you find pictures of Justin Bieber or stay in touch with friends. It’s a map that shows how many times governments around the world have contacted the company with requests—either to remove content or retrieve data about Google users. Who knew Brazil was so nosy? (continued)
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Flickr / ridiculously
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Maybe it’s laziness or maybe it’s privacy concerns, but the U.S. Census Bureau reports that 32 percent of all U.S. households receiving census questionnaires did not return them ahead of Friday’s official deadline. Come May 1, census workers will begin pounding on the doors of the laggards.
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Flickr / HeatedGroundPhotography
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Lagging a few years behind the liberal media, public opinion and common sense, the justice system has come to the conclusion that President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program broke the rules. (continued)
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Why are Scandinavians so good at murder mysteries? Was Cleopatra really hot? Plus: Stealing your water and the secret deal Obama made to kill the public option.
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The many legal ways your boss is probably spying on you, Stephen Baldwin’s latest crusade, and the famous photo even professional journalists don’t recognize—all this and more after the jump.
Posted on Mar 18, 2010
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AP / Jae C. Hong
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Google is “99.9 percent” certain it will shut down its search engine operation in China after the government in Beijing warned the company that it was flouting the country’s censorship laws, which require limited access to content like “Tiananmen Square” and “democracy.”
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U.S. Department of Homeland Security
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Igniting criticism by privacy advocates around the world, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is in the process of installing 450 full-body X-ray scanning machines in the country’s airports. The machines show images of hidden objects, as well as passengers’ bodies through their clothes.
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Flickr / The White House
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The president has signed a one-year extension of several provisions in the Patriot Act that would have expired Sunday, renewing the government’s authority to spy on phones and seize records and property of citizens.
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Jae C. Hong / AP
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Buzz, Google’s answer to Twitter, is getting a lot of bad looks from privacy advocates. The service, which allows users to share short messages or “tweets” (buzzers?) with a network of friends, is faulted for an alleged invasion of privacy that uses e-mail data to automatically create a preconfigured friends list.
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Flickr / Gail Borden Public Library
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Some conservative opponents of President Barack Obama are trying to stir up a movement against the 2010 census, arguing that the census form asks too many personal questions and is one more example of the erosion of privacy.
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In a push for increased government transparency, the Obama administration has announced it will require each Cabinet-level department to post online three collections of “high-value” data—covering everything from tire safety ratings to workplaces where injuries have occurred—previously undisclosed to the public.
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flickr / deneyterrio
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Facebook has come under fire more than once for its execs’ creative interpretations of the term privacy, and now the megasite’s fresh-faced CEO Mark Zuckerberg has drummed up a very interesting line of argument to justify his stance on the issue. What you might see as violations of personal privacy, Zuckerberg and his team view as “reflect[ing] the current social norms.” Oh.
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Original: crd! CC-BY-SA
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Most mobile phones have tiny GPS chips that do things like give directions or route your call to the right city when you dial 911. It turns out that law enforcement can ask phone companies for GPS info that reveals exactly where a phone owner is, and, according to a disturbing piece of audio making the rounds, the cops asked Sprint-Nextell for the locations of customers 8 million times in one year. (continued and video)
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Worried about the info-hungry beast that is Google going after your personal details with grabby-handed glee, greedily harvesting private information about your tastes, desires, shopping habits and geographical location with impunity? There is a way out, in the form of a remote mountain village sealed off from the world.
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thefrisky.com
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A new Oklahoma law, effective Nov. 1, will require women seeking abortions to reveal personal information such as marital status, number of children and race—all of which will be posted online. Critics say that the intent is intimidation.
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Flickr / WB-CMH
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The Internet has introduced a whole host of new marvels to the world, but as this list compiled by the U.K.’s Telegraph demonstrates, the Web giveth and the Web taketh away. And it has taken away a few things from users’ lives that we might miss (see: “The art of polite disagreement”)—others, not so much (cf. “Sarah Palin”).
Posted on Sep 9, 2009
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Collage: Flickr / Qfamily and melloveschallah
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Just about every Web site you visit, including this one, keeps track of details such as who you are, where you come from, and what you look at on the site and for how long. But some go even further to please advertisers, who may know what kind of books you read, what you search for, whom your friends are and more. Enter the House of Representatives.
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semanticweb.org
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Even if we still refuse to thank Canada for Alan Thicke and Shania Twain, we can cheer a recent push by the country’s privacy commissioner that will make social networking giant Facebook more transparent and give users more control over the data the site collects about them.
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infowars.net
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A judge has rejected a challenge to FISA brought by activists abroad who fear that their communications may be tapped by the U.S. government. The judge said fear is not enough to warrant a change in the law, and that challenges need to make explicit claims of unlawful surveillance. The question remains: How does one know he is being surveilled?
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guardian.co.uk
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If a movie written about Facebook by Aaron Sorkin wasn’t enough, the fast-growing social networking site is in the midst of hiring lobbyists in both Washington and Brussels to push for easing privacy regulations, no matter how well-meaning those restrictions may be, “that would keep people from the beneficial sharing of information.”
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businessweek.com
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Google on Wednesday officially announced its entry into the fray of contextualized advertising—serving up advertisements in accordance with a user’s prior Web-surfing habits. The move, which has raised alarm in the privacy community, carries an unprecedented privacy twist: Google users will now be able to see and edit the information the company collects about them.
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aclu.org
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The Justice Department has released nine secret memos and opinions written by the Office of Legal Counsel that authorized some of the Bush administration’s unlawful national security policies.
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There’s a revolution underway in Chinese culture as young women flock from villages to factory employment in the cities, leaving traditional values behind.
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