Tag Archives: privacy

“Where was the outrage then?” ask the trolls

posted on 8 May, 2013 also tagged

Working on drones, and increasingly in the conversation around Google Glass, I keep hearing a common refrain from people who don’t understand other people’s concerns. “There are surveillance cameras on every corner in major cities, helicopters with cameras overhead, and constant tracking in a million other ways,” the argument goes, “and where is the outrage [...]

SXSW panel proposals

posted on 19 August, 2012 also tagged , , , ,

I’ve submitted two proposals for panels at next year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin. I really hope one of them gets picked. The PanelPicker is currently open for voting (I’d appreciate your votes!) and then I’ll know later this year if I’m in. Ebooks: A Coming War for the Soul of the Library will [...]

Public transit and lawful access

posted on 6 August, 2012 also tagged , , , ,

Eric King recently posted a link to London’s Oyster Card FAQ page explaining Transport for London’s policy on requests for information from police — it rejects 5-10% of requests for providing insufficient information. It inspired me to look up Clipper Card’s policy. As I suspected, it doesn’t report any similar numbers, but it says in [...]

Bad civic hygiene

posted on 3 June, 2012 also tagged , ,

Bruce Schneier has a great cautionary quote about technology and its tendency to be subverted: It’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. He’s used the line in a few essays: one about data reuse and the role of the US census in Japanese internment, one [...]

Problems around me

posted on 31 March, 2012 also tagged , , , ,

There’s no denying the creepy factor in “Girls Around Me“, the iPhone app that until yesterday displayed the public Facebook data of women checking in nearby on Foursquare. The creepiness was obvious enough that Foursquare pulled the app’s API access, rendering the service mostly useless. But in doing so, they’ve addressed a symptom, and not [...]

Token gestures

posted on 5 March, 2012 also tagged , , ,

I’ve been thinking a lot about two different kinds of tokens lately. One is a fare token, which I’ve been thinking about as it relates to public transit and locational privacy. Another is a currency token, which has come up in the last few weeks as I’m reading Debt by David Graeber. Obviously there’s some [...]

Clickwrap privacy isn’t the answer

posted on 27 February, 2012 also tagged , , ,

Two sets of mobile app privacy stories have broken into the mainstream press this month. The first half of the month was dominated by “addressbook-gate”, where Path (and then, it turns out, many other iOS applications) were found to be uploading and storing users’ phone contact lists to their servers. In the firestorm that followed, [...]

HOWTO: Transfer OTR private keys between Adium and Pidgin

posted on 30 January, 2012 also tagged , , , , ,

I recently re-installed Ubuntu on my home computer, and wanted to move my office Mac’s Adium OTR key and collected fingerprints over to the new install. I had some trouble, but got it eventually, so I wanted to document the process. The first step is to make sure you’ve got Pidgin and Pidgin-OTR installed on [...]

Privacy, public transportation, and Berlin’s Touch&Travel program

posted on 26 July, 2011 also tagged , , ,

NPR Berlin reported today that Berlin’s public transportation authority, the BVG, launched the Touch&Travel program [de] earlier this month, which allows Vodafone and Telekom customers to use an Android phone or an iPhone to pay for their transport tickets. Participants “check in” while boarding, and confirm their location either through continuous GPS data directly from [...]