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Weinberger on Privacy
David Weinberger, author of Everything Is Miscellaneous, has written a typically thoughtful and thought-provoking piece about privacy in the digital age:
- The Privacy Non-Principle by David Weinberger, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (August 31 , 2007)
Back before the information age, privacy had a fairly well-defined set of applications. It covered what authorities could ask about you, and acts you wouldn't feel comfortable performing in the middle of a skating rink. But now it applies to wherever there's information. And nowadays, everything is information.
Although a lot of David's examples deal with online merchants, I believe much of this applies to government information as well. One way it does is summed up in David's quote of Brad Templeton's law : "If you make something easy to do, it will be done more often."
And more:
The easier it is to give somebody ID information, the more often it will be done. And the easier it is to give ID information, the more palatable it is to ask for, or demand it.
If we agree to systems that only allow us to get "authentic" government information from government-controlled web servers, it will be easy for government to ask for and even demand personal information -- and easier for users to give that information. And once the government has that information, the same principle applies to government's use of our personal information. That situation is one that we do not want to encourage or facilitate, regardless of current policies and principles of existing government agencies.
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NARA sued over access to Hillary Clinton Papers
Conservative Group Targets Hillary Clinton's Papers in Presidential Library Library Journal Academic Newswire (August 28, 2007)
The Clinton records request highlights two significant government documents issues now pending before Congress: FOIA backlogs, and a controversial Bush executive order regarding access to presidential documents.Continue reading
Students’ trust in Google “strongly biased towards links higher in position”
In Google We Trust: Users' Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance by Bing Pan, Helene Hembrooke, Thorsten Joachims, Lori Lorigo, Geri Gay, and Laura Granka. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(3), article 3. (2007)
Abstract
An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine's tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web.
Thanks to Library Journal Academic Newswire
Continue readingDMCA’s convoluted absurdities in unusually stark relief
The iPhone is locked so that it has to be used with AT&T's cellphone network. This article about software that allows users to unlock the phones asks "Would computer owners pick up an iMac that only worked with AT&T's DSL service?"
- Unlocked iPhones highlight DMCA absurdities, By Nate Anderson, ArsTechnica (August 28, 2007)
While cell phone unlocking is now legal under The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) because of a decision last year by the Library of Congress, this article speculates that AT&T will attempt to block sale of software allowing users to do so.
Allowing consumers to unlock their own property but not allowing them to purchase the tools to do so is the sort of situation that belongs only in Kafka, not in modern rulemaking.Continue reading
NASA digitization of photos and videos
NASA photo, video collection to be digitized, Digital Silence (August 27, 2007)
NASA and Internet Archive of San Francisco are partnering to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video. The imagery will be available through the Internet and free to the public, historians, scholars, students, and researchers.
NASA selected Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, as a partner for digitizing and distributing agency imagery through a competitive process. The two organizations are teaming through a non-exclusive Space Act agreement to help NASA consolidate and digitize its imagery archives using no NASA funds.
"We're dedicated to making all human knowledge available in the digital realm," said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of Internet Archive.
More interesting details at the above link.
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