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 […]
Tag Archives: privacy
Bad civic hygiene
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
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
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
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, […]