Emily Steel of the Wall Street Journal previews a House hearing on offline and online data collection and targeted advertising practices: …. In recent years, marketers have grown more adept at culling consumer data from an array of online and offline sources—including real-estate and motor-vehicle records, consumer surveys, credit-card data and logs of Web visitors’…
Newspaper editor snitches on a commenter
An online editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has generated a lot of criticism for snitching about vulgar online comments to the commenter’s employer. Jacqui Cheng writes on Ars Technica: Internet commenters aren’t generally known for their eloquence and impeccable manners. Still, people’s tasteless little one-offs are relatively harmless most of the time—until the comment…
Bloggers and anonymity – again
Oliver Kamm writes: Paul Waugh of the Evening Standard writes an excellent political blog, which I enjoy reading. But he’s inexplicably veered into nonsense on the question of bloggers’ anonymity. His starting point is the decision by Brooke Magnanti to out herself as the blogger and former call girl Belle de Jour. I’ve read Ms…
UK Health Department to Require Snooping Into Private Homes
If Croydon council’s placement of CCTV cameras inside private homes to monitor unsuspecting people outside on the street creeps you out, read on, because your UK home is no longer your castle and government intrusiveness is running amok… Joe Wolverton, II reports: Just when they thought they could not be under more surveillance or monitored…