Tag: Privacy
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Going to the doctor and worrying about cybersecurity
For most people, going to the doctor means thinking about co-pays and when they’ll feel better. For me though, it means thinking about those plus the cyber security of the computer systems being used by the medical professionals. I’ve spent more time than usual visiting doctors recently. I broke my hand – sure I’ll tell…
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United States v. Jones is a Near-Optimal Result
This morning, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in United States v. Jones, the GPS tracking case, deciding unanimously that the government violated the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights when it installed a wireless GPS tracking device on the undercarriage of his car and used it to monitor his movement’s around town for four weeks…
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Supreme Court Takes Important GPS Tracking Case
This morning, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal next term of United States v. Jones (formerly United States v. Maynard), a case in which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals suppressed evidence of a criminal defendant’s travels around town, which the police collected using a tracking device they attached to his car. For…
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Deceptive Assurances of Privacy?
Earlier this week, Facebook expanded the roll-out of its facial recognition software to tag people in photos uploaded to the social networking site. Many observers and regulators responded with privacy concerns; EFF offered a video showing users how to opt-out. Tim O’Reilly, however, takes a different tack: Face recognition is here to stay. My question…
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"You Might Also Like:" Privacy Risks of Collaborative Filtering
Ann Kilzer, Arvind Narayanan, Ed Felten, Vitaly Shmatikov, and I have released a new research paper detailing the privacy risks posed by collaborative filtering recommender systems. To examine the risk, we use public data available from Hunch, LibraryThing, Last.fm, and Amazon in addition to evaluating a synthetic system using data from the Netflix Prize dataset.…
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Web Tracking and User Privacy Workshop: Test Cases for Privacy on the Web
This guest post is from Nick Doty, of the W3C and UC Berkeley School of Information. As a companion post to my summary of the position papers submitted for last month’s W3C Do-Not-Track Workshop, hosted by CITP, Nick goes deeper into the substance and interaction during the workshop. The level of interest and participation in…
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Overstock's $1M Challenge
As reported in Fast Company, RichRelevance and Overstock.com teamed up to offer up to a $1,000,000 prize for improving “its recommendation engine by 10 percent or more.” If You Liked Netflix, You Might Also Like Overstock When I first read a summary of this contest, it appeared they were following in Netflix’s footsteps right down…
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California to Consider Do Not Track Legislation
This afternoon the CA Senate Judiciary Committee had a brief time for proponents and opponents of SB 761 to speak about CA’s Do Not Track legislation. In general, the usual people said the usual things, with a few surprises along the way. Surprise 1: repeated discussion of privacy as a Constitutional right. For those of…
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Tracking Your Every Move: iPhone Retains Extensive Location History
Today, Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan revealed that Apple’s iPhone maintains an apparently indefinite log of its location history. To show the data available, they produced and demoed an application called iPhone Tracker for plotting these locations on a map. The application allows you to replay your movements, displaying your precise location at any point…