Week XIII: Privacy
Guest Lecturer: Eric Cook
Major Topics:
Guest Lecturer: Eric Cook
Major Topics:
- A right (?) to privacy and its comparative status and countours
- Problems of attention and invasion in the eyeball economy
- Voyeurism and the perils of the half-known life
- Public and watched spaces: a surveillance society?
- Current crises in invaded privacy: impact of the "war on terror"
- Who invades privacy—government or corporations—or both?
- "Data doubles," data-mining, and "constructive" privacy invasions
- The problem of "false positives"
Assigned Readings:
- The problem of spying on citizens in the name of the "war on terror," is the stuff of considerable comment and analysis these days. Please use your info-finding skills to present to the class an article you think best summarizes or symbolizes this issue. (Find your own reading, and please forward the citation to your discussion leader). You might alternatively consider why the Brits seem less uneasy about surveillance cameras in public places.
- A short news item: TALON, a pre-ëmptive threat-assessment database run by the Department of Defense, has been shut down.
- The best compendium of citizens' privacy rights around the world can be found at the Website of Privacy International; it's kept up-to-date.
- A very nice, very recent piece on who has what powers to snoop on you; it has a nice table showing the odd and uneven power to snoop on private individuals. You'll be surprised (perhaps) to find that record companies looking for pirates have better access than do the cops looking for criminals!
- A solid survey on the history and use of Web "cookies" to track users' browsing activities.
- Automated biometric threat identification systems—face recognition cameras and software, for example—pose deep civil liberties threats, according to Margaret L. Johnson in IEEE Computer.
- In Mark Monmonier's book, Spying with Maps, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1-16, we are offered an analysis of how GIS and GPS, so powerful and useful for opening up new ways of making information, can be used to invade our privacy.
Recommended Readings:
- The "Trusted Computing Alliance," led by Microsoft, has proposed hardware-based enhancements to assure "your" privacy—or is it to assure the protection of copyrights and the content industry's ability to snoop into your computer to make sure you're not a pirate?
- From the Annenberg School at U Penn, a study of on-line privacy rights and public perceptions of them.
- A piece on how people posting things anonymously on the Web can be sued.
- From IBM Research, a proposal I've long pondered as a way to stop spam: give potential recipients of spam the right to charge spammers for access to them.
- At what point do firms that scour electronic public records for data that they can resell begin to invade our privacy? The jury (as it were) is still out. Along these lines, here's the Website for ChoicePoint, a data-mining firm made famous for generating over 6,000 false-positive matches of convicted felons and reguistered voters in Florida, just in time to purge them from the voter rolls before the 2000 elections, thereby giving FL to Bush and…
- Personal data—and all data, for that matter—needs to be accurate, and it often isn't, so in the context where one mis-keyed data entry can be replicated in IT systems millions of times over, we need to assure data integrity.
- In case you didn't know, hitting the "delete" button on your PC doesn't delete a file, it only deletes the directory entry for it; this seems to have troubled a judge in Minneapolis (I don't recommend this, but if you want some hot investor info, I bet you could buy a computer cast off by a Wall Street analyst…)
- A primer on what's involved in establishing secure digital identity, and the citeria that must be satisfied to do that.
- You're not alone in your fears about being "phished;" there's now a global anti-phishing working group.
- A good comment on convicted-felon, retired-Admiral Poindexter's data-mining project, Total Information Awareness. Here's an amusing Mark Fiore flash video about it. It's supposedly not operational, but we really don't know. A similar, active, state-based program is MATRIX. More sinister than the movie.