The Slippery Slope of Silicon Valley
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/style/uber-facebook-and-others-bedeviled-by-moral-issues.html #Tech world Yin-&-yang – eg for $GOOG, amazing free services v #privacy concerns
#NSA Intercepted Children’s Letters To Santa http://www.duffelblog.com/2013/12/nsa-letters-to-santa N Pole address is non-US & OK for snooping HT @peterwsinger @DuffelBlog
Harvard secretly photographed [2000] students to study… attendance [in 10 classes], raising #privacy concerns
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/11/05/harvard-secretly-photographed-students-study-class-attendance-raising-privacy-concerns/hC8TBdGdZmQehg0lAhnnJN/story.html
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Harvard University has revealed that it secretly photographed some 2,000 students in 10 lecture halls last spring as part of a study of classroom attendance, an admission that prompted criticism from faculty and students who said the research was an invasion of privacy. The clandestine experiment, disclosed publicly for the first time at a faculty meeting Tuesday night, came to light about a year-and-a-half after revelations that administrators had secretly searched thousands of Harvard e-mail accounts. That led the university to implement new privacy policies on electronic communication this spring, but another round of controversy followed the latest disclosure.
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A list of #Truecrypt alternatives http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1245367 Shockingly, key program defunct after 10yrs. Now onto #FileVault , BitLocker & #PGP
Where can I see a webpage that shows information about me?
See a system information script for an example of the type of information a website can get about your computer.
The Dark Market for Personal Data
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/opinion/the-dark-market-for-personal-data.html We’re all “judged by a #bigdata Star Chamber of unaccountable decision makers”
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We need regulation to help consumers recognize the perils of the new information landscape without being overwhelmed with data. The right to be notified about the use of one’s data and the right to challenge and correct errors is fundamental. Without these protections, we’ll continue to be judged by a big-data Star Chamber of unaccountable decision makers using questionable sources.
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The Solace of Oblivion http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/solace-oblivion In Europe, the right to be forgotten trumps #Google. In the US copyright is effective for this
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In the effort to escape unwanted attention on the Internet,
individuals and companies have had success with one weapon: copyright
law. It is unlawful to post photographs or other copyrighted material
without the permission of the copyright holder. “I needed to get
ownership of the photos,” Bremer, the Catsouras family’s lawyer, told
me. So he began a lengthy negotiation with the California Highway
Patrol to persuade it to surrender copyright on the photographs. In
the end, though, the C.H.P. would not make the deal.
Other victims of viral Internet trauma have fared better with the
copyright approach. In August, racy private photographs of Jennifer
Lawrence, Kate Upton, and other celebrities were leaked to several Web
sites. (The source of the leaks has not been identified.) Google has
long had a system in place to block copyrighted material from turning
up in its searches. Motion-picture companies, among others, regularly
complain about copyright infringement on YouTube, which Google owns,
and Google has a process for identifying and removing these links.
Several of the leaked photographs were selfies, so the women
themselves owned the copyrights; friends had taken the other pictures.
Lawyers for one of the women established copyrights for all the
photographs they could, and then went to sites that had posted the
pictures, and to Google, and insisted that the material be removed.
Google complied, as did many of the sites, and now the photographs are
difficult to find on the Internet, though they have not disappeared.
“For the most part, the world goes through search engines,” one lawyer
involved in the effort to limit the distribution of the photographs
told me. “Now it’s like a tree falling in the forest. There may be
links out there, but if you can’t find them through a search engine
they might as well not exist.”
…
The job had two parts. The first was technical—that is, creating a
software infrastructure so that links could be removed. This was not
especially difficult, since Google could apply the system already in
place for copyrighted and trademarked works. Similarly, Google had
already blocked links that might have led to certain dangerous or
unlawful activity, like malware or child pornography.
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They’re Watching You at Work http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/theyre-watching-you-at-work/354681 Will HR analytics be a corporate big brother or personal coach? #Datamining & #Privacy
An Inside Look at Anonymous, the Radical #Hacking Collective http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/masked-avengers Doxing & DDoSing, aggression for a new century