Here’s an interview on google privacy issues I did last week for IT Business Edge.
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Category Archives: surveillance
Google Privacy Interview
30-Sep-08OpenDNS and Firefox Search
07-Sep-08Doc asks why opendns has broken the search from the address bar feature of his firefox. The problem is that the address bar fail over to google relies on the dns request failing, but opendns requests never fail. Instead, if an opendns server gets a request for a non-existent address, it display the [...]
Midnight Piggybacking
14-Aug-08So I’m sitting here at my excellent local Memphis honda repair shop getting Little Tokyo’s oil changed. In addition to being locally run, honest, and professional, the shop has wifi, so I can sit and work (or blog!) while getting my car fixed. The wifi wasn’t working today, so I asked the owner [...]
Digital Cameras v. Nigeria
12-Aug-08One of my guiding theories of the modern media / advertising landscape is that the extensive real time surveillance of consumers by online advertisers and content providers encourages the growth of content about digital cameras (the content about which is easily monetized) at the expense of hard news, especially international news about developing countries like [...]
I’ve been playing around with the new Google Insights for Search, which is targeted to advertisers but is terribly interesting for anyone interested in media issues. Here’s a comparison of searches for newspaper, blog, and magazine:
Worldwide
U.S.
Nigeria
Leaving aside the obvious qualifications about the limitations of this metric, the fact that blogs have become more popular [...]
FlyClear Data Breach
08-Aug-08FlyClear, the company that handles an express lane security clearance in some U.S. airports, recently lost control of a laptop that contained personal data used to verify the identity of subscribers. The company has repeatedly pointed out that no social security numbers or credit card numbers were included in the data as if that’s [...]
I’ve been looking at deep packet inspection / targeted advertising company Phorm for the past couple of days and have found a clear and simple case of Phorm violating its own privacy policy in contradiction to Ernst & Young’s audit of the company’s systems.
Phorm has been energetically defending itself against complaints about the privacy risks [...]
Passport Security
04-Jul-08The state department released the results of an audit yesterday that found that large numbers of government workers (meaning both employees and contractors) have been regularly accessing the passport files of celebrities:
The 192 million passport files maintained by the State Department contain individuals’ passport applications, which include data such as Social Security numbers, physical descriptions, [...]
Google Adwords Category Exclusion
24-Jun-08Google recently added category exclusion to its adwords system, allowing advertisers to choose not to support content that deals with topics such as “death & tragedy” and “military & international conflict”. The new category exclusion feature allows an advertiser exclude from its content network any pages that belong to a specified set of topics [...]
Two Spectacles
28-Mar-08I’ve been pondering how the concept of spectacle fits in with surveillance. In particular, I’ve been bouncing around two different concepts of the spectacle, one by Michel Foucault and the other by Scott Bukatman.
Here’s an execution spectacle in Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish:
‘Finally, he was quartered,’ recounts the Gazette d’Amsterdam of 1 April 1757. [...]