Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Privacy

  • Privacy and Technology

    Isaac Asimov has an interesting pre-World-Wide Web quote, “The advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.” Janov Pelorat in Foundation’s Edge (1982). Think about the word “civilization”. The root, civil, means to treat others well. In one ideal world, everyone would treat everyone else well for no reason. In hunter-gather…

  • Full Body Scanners

    I was starting to be okay with this description of a whole body imaging  Transportation Security Administration plans to implement. One, there’s technology that allows the body to be transmuted into merely a cartoon stick figure. So it’s not as if anyone’s genitalia or private parts are being revealed. Instead, it’s just an outline of…

  • Helping?

    Saturday I didn’t go anywhere. Sunday, a piece of paper fell out of the door. All my neighbors had what appeared to be the same paper in their doors. The point of the note is to be careful about letting people know you are away from home for Christmas. In a college town like here,…

  • Trusting Social Networks

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    Sunday at brunch we had an interesting conversation about Facebook. Establishing the appropriate privacy levels to the various constituents see appropriate material is hard. So hard it takes a long pages of text and screenshots to just paint a picture of what to review for the top 10 Facebook privacy settings. We were discussing how…

  • Stalking Students

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    On the BLKBRD-L email list is a discussion about proving students are cheating. Any time the topic comes up, someone says a human in a room is the only way to be sure. Naturally, someone else responds with the latest and greatest technology to detect cheating. In this case, Acxiom offers identity verification: By matching…

  • Naked on the Net

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    The typical response to a “OMG Users Don’t Have the Privacy They Think They Do” article is to never post anything online or just never visit web sites where you would post something. These seem…. Paranoid. People have an expectation of privacy. People also inherently trust web sites unless they have been burned enough in…

  • Blog Delurking Week

    The last day of Blog Delurking Week is today. Based on the web server logs, lots of people read. A few comment. Its okay people don’t comment (aka lurk). If you have something to say, then I am sure you will. Otherwise, I am sure you will remain silent. 🙂

  • No More Public Anonymous Photos

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    Early in the history of the WWW, people thought a document which did not have an inbound link, a link from some external location to the file, was private. Search engines looked for content on web sites in locations for which there was not a link already pointing. To truly respect the privacy of those…

  • Your Cell Phone Is the FBI’s Bug

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    For all my criminal wannabe friends. Where you can talk without being overheard is becoming smaller and smaller. Its starting feeling like a Sci-Fi novel. 🙁 FBI using cell phone microphones to eavesdrop: Cell phones are capable of providing more information about us and our whereabouts than we usually realize. We are have long since…