Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger write: Facebook’s announcement of its new Graph search tool on Tuesday set off yet another round of rapid-fire analysis about whether Facebook is properly handling its users’ privacy. Unfortunately, most of the rapid-fire analysts haven’t framed the story properly. Yes, Zuckerberg appears to be respecting our current privacy settings. And, yes, there just…
Category: Misc
Has Texas gone totally surveillance-loopy?
I couldn’t understand why a regular reader from Texas sent me a link to an article about fining residents if they didn’t clean up their dog poo. After all, that’s the case in many towns and cities by now and didn’t strike me as newsworthy. But then I read the news story and my jaw…
Bill Maher: Privacy under attack, not guns
Kevin Cirilli reports: Liberal comic Bill Maher said Friday that Americans aren’t losing their Second Amendment rights — just “all the other ones,” and then compared the country to a strip club without strippers. “It’s not your Second Amendment rights that are under attack — it’s all the other ones,” Maher said on HBO’s “Real…
A shock in the dark: Flashlight app tracks your location
Bob Sullivan reports: The element of surprise causes hard feelings when it comes to privacy violations, and mobilephone apps are ambushing consumers far too often, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Researchers at the school’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute studied both the data gathered by the 100 most popular programs in Google’s Android app store,…