Tag: privacy

Bookmarks for August 27, 2010

Bookmarks for August 19, 2010

Bookmarks for July 13, 2010

  • Bankrupt Gay Teen Site May Be Forced to Hand Over Personal Information of Users
    This is why you need to be careful with what data you hand to what websites, kids. You might well trust any given website website and the people running it today, but if something goes wrong, and the company goes bankrupt, your data is an asset that belongs to them. And as this article makes clear, the only thing that bankruptcy administrators are allowed to care about it getting the most money back for the creditors. Which means (at the moment, pending a change in the law to improve privacy in cases like this) they're ethically constrained from being picky about what happens to your data – if the highest bidder is a shit who is going to use the data to make everyone involved's life in some way worse, that's just tough for them, because they have to sell to the highest bidder in order to fairly represent the creditor's interests.
  • The Technium: The Maes-Garreau Point
    Interesting piece about predictions, singularities, and the tendency of utopians (and a lot of doomsayers) to predict paradigm shifting event to occur around the end of their own lifetime.
    Tags: future, theory
  • HelvetiNote™
    If they add some form of over-the-air syncing, then I'm sold.

Bookmarks for June 1, 2010

Bookmarks for May 19, 2010

Bookmarks for May 13, 2010

  • The Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change. – Pew Research Center
    I'd always thought Gen X stopped in about 1975, but apparently I'm a gen Xer. But this survey isn't about me, so much as it's about a lot of the people I know. It's, er, interesting. I'd like to see similar stats for the UK….
  • Coilhouse » Blog Archive » Save the Life of Kiana Firouz
    Well, here's an interesting test case for out new government, and for caring sharing Dave and his compassionate conservatism. But more importantly, do like the article says, and start writing, if you'd prefer that Britain not deport people who will be tortured or killing for the crime of being a lesbian.
  • Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options – Graphic – NYTimes.com
    I'm not sure I've got all this locked down, even on my ultra-locked-down work-only account. And I am by any reasonable lights, an expert web user. How is the casual user supposed to get it right?
  • Facebook is a feminist issue | Geek Feminism Blog
    This, by the way, it why I get so het up over privacy. This page contains a link to some talk about how facebook until the other day, made it possible to trace your location. I didn't blog the link, because Facebook fixed the hole before I could, but the fact it existed at all relates to a wider point about their privacy culture – they either do not think, or do not care, about how it will affect vulnerable people for whom privacy is a very important concern. And it's all very well for them to say "if you don't want it public, don't put it on facebook", but why should the vulnerable, for whom it might make the most difference, have less rights to share with their friends? Why should excluding the vulnerable from Facebook be acceptable?

Bookmarks for May 11, 2010

Bookmarks for April 21, 2010

  • antumbral: dear lj: plz to stop being dicks, kthx
    LJ are doing the link re-writing thing again. As this post makes clear, the reason it is bad (even if you don't care about money, like I don't) is essentially because a third party company will get info about what links to external websites you are clicking, if you are clicking on them when they've been posted by people who haven't opted out of this scheme. I have, and absent LJ being total arseholes about it and ingnoring the opt-out (at which point, I will be shutting up shop on LJ) links clicked from my journal should always be safe. Do me a favour, and leave a comment if you've similarly opted out, so I can try and track whose links I am happy to click?

Bookmarks for February 12, 2010