Shorter but not necessarily sweeter: Idiocy
Month: October 2010
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Facebook Privacy: Gay Users Outed to Advertisers
Article via Ars Technica in which researchers discovered that Facebook may inadvertently be outing gay users to its advertisers.
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Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t read EULAs either
In a recent appearance at Canisius College, Chief Justice John Roberts addressed two interesting questions from the floor. One concerned the issue of televised oral arguments. Roberts expressed concern about the hesitation some might feel when answering questions on camera for an invisible and potentially limitless audience. The question here seems to be one that has troubled courts for some time: how much and what type of publicity is appropriate to an open court system? The other–and the more well reported–question concerned end-user licensing agreements (EULAs) for software and web-based services. Robert flatly admitted that he does not read the fine print, noting that the sheer amount of information contained in such agreements tends to defeat the purpose of disclosure. He went on to say that “the legal system obviously is to blame,” and that he had no answer to the problem. That the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court would simply click-through such agreements is but an extreme example of the problem that Yannis Bakos, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, and David R. Trossen have already demonstrated in their excellent paper, “Does Anyone Read the Fine Print?“: that there are nowhere near enough term-conscious users to discipline companies who might employ unfavorable terms. And as the write-up from TechDirt further notes, Roberts’ admission also casts doubt on the legal standing of such instances of mindless assent.
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There’s One in Every Crowd
Right on time for Halloween, a spooky post reminding us that creepy people offline + creepy people online = creepy people across domains. It never hurts to remember to always be careful out there…
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More on Street View
So, there has been a fair amount of talk about Google’s Street View faux pas. Apparently, the data breach was more significant than some had anticipated. Apparently, among the bits and pieces of data collected were full emails!.
Perhaps more interesting is a hack developed by Samy Kamkar that uses MAC address information collected by Google to maliciously (and extremely accurately) determine a user’s geographical coordinates. Kamkar has a video demonstrating this hack (and the extent of information collected by Google’s Street View rovers here.
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Facebook’s Lobbying
Probably a good idea to keep an eye on lobbying efforts. Not that we don’t all do this anyway, but it’s the kind of thing that can fall under the radar in light of the more headline-friendly privacy issues. Here are some informative related links:
Full 4Q 2010 information here.
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HTML5 and Mobile Tracking
From Ars Technica Article: “A New York-based mobile-web advertising company was hit Wednesday with a proposed class action lawsuit over its use of an HTML5 trick to track iPhone and iPad users across a number of websites, in what is believed to be the first privacy lawsuit of its kind in the mobile space.” Full article here.
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Smart grid technology and privacy
Smart grid technology offers major improvements and efficiencies for our power system, creating a dynamically responsive grid that can do things like manage peak load energy consumption, optimize transmission routes, smoothly integrate other generation options like solar and wind, and can help users monitor and control their own consumption (including creating more accurate pricing for energy). To do this, though, it needs continuous and real-time data about energy use — and as it turns out individual appliances have a “load signature,” a visible pattern of consumption — which is to say, a way of looking right inside individual homes from the feed of their power use. IEEE has some interesting analysis of the privacy problems and how they could be remediated.
(Hat tip to Solon!)