MichaelZimmer.org

[UPDATE: The final paper has been published in Ethics and Information Technology] Next week I will be attending the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I will be presenting an early draft of a paper based on my critique of the “Taste, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release. Recall [...]

One of my students pointed me to this post noting that Sony Online Entertainment has provided 4 years of server log data for their online game EverQuest 2 to researchers. From the Ars Technica story: With the cooperation of Sony, a collaborative group of academic researchers at a number of institutions have obtained the complete [...]

Information is leverage. Information is power. Information is Maltego. These are the catch-phrases for a South African company that recently released an affordable, user-friendly data mining tool called Maltego, bringing powerful data-mining technology to the masses. While targeted mostly to forensics and information security professionals, it is not hard to see how such a tool [...]

I was recently asked by the campus newspaper to comment on a new Facebook application called CampusBuddy.  Utilizing grading records from 250 public colleges and universities nationwide (public schools generally are legally obligated to release their grades upon request), CampusBuddy provides grade histograms for individual institutions, departments, courses, and even professors. Students can also chat [...]

(See my update at the bottom of the post, as well as Fred Stutzman’s thoughtful analysis) As mentioned the other day, a group of researchers from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University released a dataset of Facebook profile information from an entire cohort (the class of 2009) of college students from [...]

(Updated below with responses to comments by Jason Kaufman, one of the lead researchers on this project) (Another update: I’m pretty sure the “anonymous, Northeastern university” from where this dataset was derived is Harvard College. Details here) A group of researchers have released a dataset of Facebook profile information from a group of college students [...]

CNET reports that the University of California at Berkeley is creating an interdisciplinary center for advanced search technologies in search of creating the “ultimate search tool” and to “address the explosive growth of Internet search and the complex issues that have arisen in the field.” Such issues (many of which I’ve previously commented on) include [...]

Representing a greater online privacy threat than cookies or spyware, the DOJ is considering making Internet service providers retain records of their customers’ online activities. From the CNet article: The U.S. Department of Justice is quietly shopping around the explosive idea of requiring Internet service providers to retain records of their customers’ online activities. Data [...]