MichaelZimmer.org

I’ve been incredibly busy lately, and need to quickly catch up on some recent items of note: Siva Vaidhyanathan has launched a new blog for his forthcoming book, “The Googlization of Everything“… …while Cory Doctorow provides his fictional vision of Google at its most evil extreme, working with Homeland Security to monitor and track citizens. [...]

Taking contextual advertising to the next logical level, it has been reported that a recent patent filing indicates Microsoft want to develop an advertising framework that uses applications and data on one’s computer, rather than one’s actions on the Web, to provide context for triggering ads. Imagine writing a letter in Word and having the [...]

I’m supposed to be on vacation this week, but felt compelled to blog about this… There has been increased attention lately about Google’s data retention policies and the impact its drive towards personalization might have on user privacy. In response, one of Google’s chief privacy lawyers, Peter Fleisher, whose opinion I normally have high regard [...]

A new study by ChoiceStream, a (surprise!) provider of online personalization products, announces their latest personalization survey reveals an increasing number of web users are willing to provide personal information in order to receive personalized services. From the summary at EContent: According to the survey, the number of consumers willing to provide demographic information in [...]

Gord Hotchkiss, the president of a search engine marketing firm, writes what at first appears to be a thoughtful and reflective essay on how the rise of behavioral targeting within the search engine advertising market (his bread and butter): The mechanisms are already in place for search engines to track your online behavior. Tool bars, [...]

Blogging has been light lately as I’m busy (a) finalizing details for the Identity & Identification in a Networked World symposium at NYU, (b) working out the logistics for my upcoming research trip to Europe (which now also includes a stop at Aalborg University in Denmark), and (c) trying to make some progress on the [...]

John Battelle repeats an important concern regarding the extensive profiles search engine providers, like Google, are amassing on each user. He quotes Greg Linden’s reaction to a Google paper on Bigtable, a distributed storage system: One tidbit I found curious in the Google Bigtable paper was this hint about the internals of Google Personalized Search: [...]

The collaborators at the important “On the Identity Trail” project in Canada were kind enough to ask me to write an essay for their blog. Here is an excerpt: Surveillance in Spheres of Mobility: Privacy, Technical Design and the Flow of Personal Information on the Transportation and Information Superhighways A recent Nassau County Supreme Court [...]

At a roundtable lunch with reporters, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt remarked that he “expects advertising will be the growth engine of Google for a very long time,” noting specifically that “Google ads are very targetable, because Google knows a lot about the person surfing, especially if they have used personal search or logged into a [...]

Google’s drive to “organize all the world’s information” is no joke, and they want that to inlucde all “100% of user data” according to notes from a Google presentation found by Greg Linden: Theme 2: Store 100% of User Data With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, [...]