From the category archives:

privacy

How Advertisers Use Internet Cookies to Track Your Online Habits

18 October 2010
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What is behavioral targeting? Is it a violation of your privacy for businesses to track your movements online via cookies? What are cookies, anyway? Are cookies helpful, or do they provide too much information? Should you worry about how much digital exhaust you trail?
Christina Tsuei of the Wall Street Journal explains how advertisers use cookies [...]

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How to Tame Your Data When Mom is on Facebook

13 October 2010
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What do you do when your mom gets on Facebook? Do you not “friend” her, do you become more careful about what you post, or do you put her into a special group with limited access to your page? If you do the latter, what do you do when she asks why she can’t [...]

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Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Data & Information?

11 October 2010
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You graduate from college. You want to close out those years, but share them with your friends who might want to glean some useful information from your knowledge and experience. Perhaps they are still undergraduates themselves? How do you share that information? If you are Karen Owen, a 2010 graduate of Duke University, you create [...]

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Google Releases World Map of Government Censorship Requests

28 September 2010
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How would you display a somewhat abstract term like “censorship” to your users and the rest of the world?
Earlier this week, Google released the latest version of their censorship map. Via the BBC: “the new map and tools follows on from that and allows users to click an individual country to see how many [...]

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Satire No. 2: Colbert Takes on Eric Schmidt, Google, and Facebook’s Mining and Selling of Personal Data

8 September 2010
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Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, “predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites”. Schmidt made the statement in an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins that ran [...]

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Satire No. 1: Eric Schmidt, Google and Your Digital Exhaust

7 September 2010
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Is Google Evil? What secrets do your family members hold? What does Google actually know about you based on your digital exhaust? Is there a difference between having something to hide and some things not being anyone’s business?
Consumer Watchdog has created an animation that shows Google CEO Eric Schmidt driving an ice cream truck around, [...]

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The Internet’s Black Holes by Reporters without Borders

20 August 2010
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Where on earth can data roam free, and where is it filtered, controlled, and contained? Where are the black holes of information flow on the Internet?
According to Reporters without Borders, the Internet’s “Black Holes” are Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Maldives, Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. How do [...]

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Facebook: By the Numbers

5 July 2010
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The numbers behind the Facebook phenomenon are staggering. Users spend 500 million minutes per month on the site. Seventy different languages are used on Facebook. As of December 2000, there were an estimated 361 million users on the Internet; as of 2010, Facebook alone has 400 million users. As of this writing, the Facebook user [...]

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Bruce Schneier on “Security, Privacy, and the Generation Gap”

10 April 2010
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Bruce Schneier gave a great talk on privacy at the recent CACR Higher Education Security Summit. Basically, he argues that privacy isn’t dead and we should aim for more privacy laws. It is a thought-provoking talk that is worth watching. I also enjoyed hearing the questions from attendees, and his thoughtful responses to them.

His talk [...]

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Google “Buzz”, Too Much Information

18 February 2010
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The other week I wrote about my own complicity in sharing my private data via Facebook. I do this and I continue to do it because I gain something from using Facebook. I think of Facebook as going to a local coffee shop. You are able to keep up with a wide variety of people [...]

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