Sigh.
I don’t like to get overly political here, but still… this is ridiculous…
Who needs privacy? Who needs civil liberties? Not Americans. Apparently that’s what our elected officials believe. The NYTimes is reporting on the Senate putting a big, fat stamp of approval on Bush’s previously illegal wiretapping without a warrant schemes. FISA retroactively gives [...]

Categories: homeland security · politics · privacy · rant

So I was reading this piece on design observer about, more or less, the use of anonymous handles on the internet. The author suggests this:
Having a pseudonym is not about, as some argue, building a brand story or mystique; it is about masking identity, which is inherently deceitful. Unless one has a good reason — [...]

Categories: blogs · privacy

Huh, well it turns out that Facebook backs down - it couldn’t ride out the media on it’s most recent beacon “feature”. I’m honestly kind of a little surprised - it seemed to me like the sort of thing that was big noise in the blogger world but very little noise in regular people’s world [...]

Categories: privacy · social networks

Project Beacon is the latest controversy surrounding good ol’ Facebook. It’s a “service” that third party stores can use that will publicize your purchases at said store into your facebook news feed, so you go to a participating online retailer buy widget X and all of a sudden all your friends and coworkers get to [...]

Categories: politics · privacy · social networks

So we all know that the UK loves it some CCTV surveillance of it’s citizens, the criminal lot of ‘em. We thought that kinda Big Brother was confined to the loonies across the Atlantic, but it turns out we’ve got some of our very own mid-western loonies. Chicago has been rolling out “thousands of video [...]

Categories: breakfast links · privacy

I was just browsing around my feeds recently and came across two pieces that kinda got me thinking. The first was this BBC article on how the US and UK are increasingly looking for ways to keep their citizenry under constant surveillance. It talks a little bit about some things that are being worked on, [...]

Categories: privacy

Ah well, remember last night? I posted that thing about how Microsoft decided that they could do whatever they wanted to your computer without telling you? You know, how Microsoft has some boundary issues on what’s yours and what’s theirs?
Well check out this article talking about the adware patent that Microsoft filed that shows how [...]

Categories: microsoft · privacy

I just read that the new US passports with the RFID chips are now happening (via gizmodo). Not only do they have to decrease our privacy and security (as Bruce Schneier explains in this post) they had to go and redesign it.
Now, I’ve been around people who are making design decisions. I also have been [...]

Categories: privacy · travel

SEE ALSO: my comparative review of Guerrilla Mail, Mailinator, MintEmail and Dodgeit.
Check out Guerrilla Mail. This is a fantastic idea that I can’t believe I’ve only recently found. For all those sites that require you to sign up with an email address to whom you really don’t care to hand over your contact info, Guerrilla [...]

Categories: privacy · web app

Boing boing brings this wired article to my attention. It tells of a chinese dissident who was using Yahoo to send pro-democracy writings to a group of people. Yahoo seems to have given up the man’s information to the Chinese government and he was arrested and jailed. Read the article, their story is horrifying and [...]

Categories: privacy