Jeff Jarvis comments: At two privacy conferences — one in New York, the other right now in Victoria, B.C. — I’ve watched the growth of privacy’s regulatory/industrial complex and seen its strategy in action: Scare, then sell. [..] At a later panel, I saw a vendor go through his PowerPoint showing the growth of so…
Category: Misc
Data at Your Fingertips: Biometrics and the Challenges to Privacy
From the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada: Canadians are witnessing a growing interest among government and private-sector organizations in adopting systems that use biometric characteristics to automatically identify people or verify their identity. But whether a fingertip, a face or an iris is being scanned, what’s being collected is personal information about an…
Facebook Data of 1.2 Million Users from 2005 Released: Limited Exposure, but Very Problematic
Michael Zimmer writes: Last week, a Facebook dataset was released by a group of researchers (Amanda L. Traud, Peter J. Mucha, Mason A. Porter) in connection with their paper studying the role of user attributes – gender, class year, major, high school, and residence – on social network formations at various colleges and universities. The dataset —…
HBGary CEO Also Suggested Tracking, Intimidating WikiLeaks’ Donors
Andy Greenberg writes: WikiLeaks and its inner circle of supporters may not have been the only targets of a group of security firms that offered to take on the secret-spilling site on behalf of Bank of America. In an email conversation, the head of one of those firms also suggested going after the thousands of…