Julia Angwin and Tom McGinty have a must-read story in the Wall Street Journal: The largest U.S. websites are installing new and intrusive consumer-tracking technologies on the computers of people visiting their sites—in some cases, more than 100 tracking tools at a time—a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. […] n an effort to quantify…
Month: July 2010
Breaking a Promise on Surveillance
From a New York Times editorial: It is just a technical matter, the Obama administration says: We just need to make a slight change in a law to make clear that we have the right to see the names of anyone’s e-mail correspondents and their Web browsing history without the messy complication of asking a…
The TSA’s Secure Flight initiative may be making your privacy less secure
Christopher Elliott writes: Thanks for the birthday card, Southwest Airlines. The computer-generated missive, complete with signatures of the airline’s executives, landed in my mailbox just before the big day. At first I was flattered by the thoughtful gesture. But then I was troubled. How did they know my birthday? And then it occurred to me:…
Did we pronounce privacy dead this week?
Caroline McCarthy reports: Does privacy exist anymore? Do we even know what it is? A conversation between digital academics Jeff Jarvis and Danah Boyd on Friday morning at the Supernova conference capped off a week in which many peoples’ perceptions of the tension between public and private data online were shaken (and stirred). “We have…