MichaelZimmer.org

MIT’s Technology Review has a brief article about advances in zoom technology for cellphone cameras. This adds a new dimension to the privacy and surveillance threats cellphone cameras pose. We experienced a major advancement in camera zoom technology around the turn of the century, which spurred Warren & Brandeis to write their seminal article “The [...]

While we’re all too familiar with how surveillance cameras are becoming ubiquitous, they are now also becoming recursive: CCTV to safeguard speed cameras

I’ve been meaning to blog about the discussion at Concurring Opinions regarding the rise of “cyber-shaming” – the act of posting online elements of seemingly private conversations or events that you happened to overhear or witness. Examples include the posting of details of annoying cellphone calls overheard, uploading of cellphone camera images of men who [...]

The NY Times has a feature today on the prevalence of GPS-enabled cell phones for the surveillance of one’s kids. (Boost Mobile [page has audio] has also been pitching their GPS tracking features to adults so you can “know where your friends are at.”) Unfortunately I’m much too busy writing the diss to provide any [...]

A post on Slashdot recalls the discovery of an SUV filming the streets of San Francisco: Today as we were biking around our neighborhood in a small city we saw a strange vehicle slowly driving around. It appeared to be an SUV, bristling with cameras mounted on the roof, and pointing just about every possible [...]

Another example of the need for value-conscious design: Wired News summarizes a damning report from four University of Washington researchers that reveals how security flaws in the new RFID-powered Nike + iPod Sport Kit make it easy for tech-savvy stalkers, spouses, thieves, corporations, or governments (oh my!) to track your movements via those nifty shoes. [...]

The theory of “privacy as contextual integrity” provides the tools for considering how the introduction of new technologies/practices within a particular context might disrupt norms of information flow, potentially threatening values of privacy, autonomy, or liberty. It is especially useful when considering subtle shifts in information flows that flirt with the boundaries between public & [...]

I’ve commented about some of the privacy & surveillance implications of adding location meta tags in photos, everyone snapping photos in public with their cellphone cameras, and the rise of amateur surveillance and data-mining. Many of these concerns are repeated in an essay on the Guardian warning of the growing dangers of peer-to-peer surveillance, defined [...]

A group of computer scientists from the University of Minnesota recently presented a fascinating paper “You are what you say: privacy risks of public mentions,” Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval, 2006. Their concern is the ability to identify pseudononymous people by comparing datasets of [...]

As a follow-up to this long ago posting, the National Highway Traffic Safety Asministration has passed a resolution requiring car manufacturers to inform buyers if their cars are equipped with event data recorders (EDRs). Car manufacturers must comply with the new regulation beginning in the 2011 model year; currently, about 64 percent of model year [...]