Michael Zimmer, PhD, is a digital privacy and data ethics scholar at Marquette University
Some filmmakers have produced an amazing series of episodes based on one person's searches discovered in the AOL search data release debacle. Here's the trailer: And the description from the website where you can view them all: August 4, 2006,…
Read More I Love Alaska: Amazing Film Inspired by AOL Search Data Release
(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…
Read More On the “Anonymity” of the Facebook Dataset (Updated)
Prompted by Google's resistance to cluttering its homepage with a link to its privacy policy, I decided to take a quick tour of the major search engines to compare the relative visibility of their privacy policies. AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo!…
A recent column by Christopher Soghoian on CNet predicts a decline in companies sharing "anonymized" user data with the academic research community. Along with last year's AOL data release debacle, Soghoian points to a more recent case where researchers were…
Leading into this week's FTC town hall meeting addressing the growing concerns about Internet and search companies developing the means to track and profile users, AOL has announced plans to enable users to sign up for "do-not-track" lists similar to…
Adam Fields points to this disturbing revelation that ISPs are apparently selling their customer's clickstream data. The guilty ISPs apparently took the same "anonymization" seminar as AOL, merely replacing user names with User 1, User 2, etc. And what kind…
Read More Your Clickstream Data: 40 cents; Losing Your Privacy: Priceless
The Wall Street Journal has published a debate (well, an e-mail exchange) between Kevin Bankston, a privacy lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Markham Erickson, a lobbyist for Internet firms including Google and Yahoo, on the topic of the…
The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides these tips to help keep your search history anonymous: How can you help prevent damaging privacy invasions like AOL's data leak? Along with spreading the word about this debacle, you can take steps to protect…
From the EFF: AOL's data leak is a disaster, but there may be some silver lining. By putting the spotlight on the dangers of Internet companies storing massive amounts of private information, the data leak could spur better business practices…
Why was the AOL data dump wrong? "Because it hurts people. It makes them feel defensive about their own thoughts and ideas," says Mary Hodder. She's right.
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