The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. That metaphor is the map.
The lack of security and privacy online has some technology experts pushing for a do-over on the Internet, according to a Sunday Week in Review article in the New York Times.
“What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a ‘gated community’ where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety,” writes John Markoff.
There are plenty of people who can muster outrage at Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees third baseman who is the latest example of win-at-any-cost athletes. But I’d prefer to see him as at the cutting edge of another scourge–the growing encroachment on privacy.
It seems we’re approaching a new age here on the Internet. Instead of being anonymous, faceless IP addresses, social computing and changing technologies have allowed the lines between the “real” world and the “virtual” world to blur.
For all the talk about privacy and security, it seems that a lot of people are downright sloppy when it comes to who they provide personal information.
A couple of prime examples this week where large numbers of unsuspecting or naive [people] happily handed over their usernames and passwords to a third party simply because the service looked cool.
Your iPhone is watching you. If you’ve got an iPhone, pretty much everything you have done on your handset has been temporarily stored as a screenshot that hackers or forensics experts could eventually recover.
If there’s a candidate for the worst future violator of your privacy, look no further than the company you pay for broadband.
There’s a famous saying by John Gilmore, that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” However, that saying may apply equally to other “damage” beyond censorship.
On July 3, Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court in California made a ruling particularly worthy of the nation’s attention. In Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc. v. Bush, a key case in the epic battle over warrantless spying inside the United States, Judge Walker ruled, effectively, … that the president lacks the authority to disregard the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
Want to know how well a company protects its customers’ data? Don’t talk to its security and compliance officers. Instead, try its marketing department.
The Singularity is a conceit of modern science fiction: a place inside vast computers where whole universes are simulated whose reality is every bit as sharp and instantaneous as the physical world we inhabit. Books like Charlie Stross’s “Singularity Sky” and the Matrix movie trilogy have done a great job of representing such alternative, computer-calculated realities.
Google’s breadth of services is truly awesome, and the amount of information the company touches concerning our lives and world can sometimes feel downright frightening. While almost no one takes the old phrase “Don’t Be Evil” seriously anymore–now that there are billions of dollars on the table and Chinese autocrats to satisfy–regular evaluations of Google’s ethical positions still seem advisable.
Google is facing the wrath of privacy advocates once again over concerns that it’s not posting its privacy policy “conspicuously” enough to comply with California law. On Tuesday, a coalition of groups that have questioned Google’s practices in the past sent a four-paragraph letter to CEO Eric Schmidt, charging that “Google’s reluctance to post a link to its privacy policy on its home page is alarming.”
Online advertising has ballooned into a roughly $45 billion-a-year business, to the benefit of Google, Yahoo, ad networks and innumerable specialty and hobbyist Web sites. One corner of this ecosystem that hasn’t managed to cash in on advertising is, by some measurements, the largest: broadband providers. So it may have been inevitable that they would seek additional revenue by monitoring their customers’ online activities and creating behavioral profiles that could yield hyper-relevant ads.
The FBI has backed down on a secret request for information about a user of the Internet Archive digital library, thanks to a legal challenge from two prominent advocacy groups. The case, which was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the archive, dates to last year but only became public on Wednesday. That’s because the type of request involved, known as a national security letter, is accompanied by a gag order that forbids the recipient from disclosing its existence or discussing it with anyone except his attorneys, who are also gagged. As a result of a settlement, the FBI agreed to withdraw the national security letter and to lift the gag order.
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