When I first heard about SnapChat I was immediately reminded of the attempts of a friend of mine to establish a DRM’d email platform that would let recipients read an email but not do anything else with it that hadn’t been explicitly authorized (printing, forwarding, etc). There was some amazingly fancy crypto technology involved. In the end though it was never possible to close up the many holes inside general purpose computing technology. Those of course include the ultimate hole – the so-c...

When I first heard about SnapChat I was immediately reminded of the attempts of a friend of mine to establish a DRM’d email platform that would let recipients read an email but not do anything else with it that hadn’t been explicitly authorized (printing, forwarding, etc). There was some amazingly fancy crypto technology involved. In the end though it was never possible to close up the many holes inside general purpose computing technology. Those of course include the ultimate hole – the so-c...

Yesterday I posted about how the current Do Not Track debate is muddling the underlying issues. I got a great reply from Mike Yang on Twitter that rightly pointed out at P3P had been a mess in part because Microsoft jumped the gun on it. That got me to think about an even broader context here which is the shift to mobile. A do not track battle on the web only is even more absurd in the context of a rapid shift in where people spend time and can be tracked even better (at least in the new iOS)...

Yesterday I posted about how the current Do Not Track debate is muddling the underlying issues. I got a great reply from Mike Yang on Twitter that rightly pointed out at P3P had been a mess in part because Microsoft jumped the gun on it. That got me to think about an even broader context here which is the shift to mobile. A do not track battle on the web only is even more absurd in the context of a rapid shift in where people spend time and can be tracked even better (at least in the new iOS)...

So Facebook settled with the FTC over privacy and Mark Zuckerberg wrote another apologetic blog post (as pointed out by Liz Gannes this is his tenth). Part of the need for these apologies comes from Facebook’s aggressive approach to releasing features which at some level is admirable in a company of their scale. But what is really driving the problems is a fundamental conundrum about privacy in the digital age. Anything that was private a second ago can be made public by someone else with oft...

So Facebook settled with the FTC over privacy and Mark Zuckerberg wrote another apologetic blog post (as pointed out by Liz Gannes this is his tenth). Part of the need for these apologies comes from Facebook’s aggressive approach to releasing features which at some level is admirable in a company of their scale. But what is really driving the problems is a fundamental conundrum about privacy in the digital age. Anything that was private a second ago can be made public by someone else with oft...

Following f8, there has been a new explosion of discussion around Facebook’s voracious data gathering. For instance, Facebook keeps cookies on your machine even when you are logged out which allows them at least in principle to track your visits to sites with Facebook social plugins. Add to that the Ticker, which is really just Beacon redux with better timing and some semblance of an opt-in, and you have a ton of data on your activities on the web flowing to Facebook. Since I have been bother...

Following f8, there has been a new explosion of discussion around Facebook’s voracious data gathering. For instance, Facebook keeps cookies on your machine even when you are logged out which allows them at least in principle to track your visits to sites with Facebook social plugins. Add to that the Ticker, which is really just Beacon redux with better timing and some semblance of an opt-in, and you have a ton of data on your activities on the web flowing to Facebook. Since I have been bother...

This seems to be the week for legal blog posts. After trying a slightly revised version of COICA with new branding (now: PROTECT IP), Senator Leahy has come out with a very sensible piece of legislation, the ECPA Amendments Act of 2011. As the name says, this is is an amendment to the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986 for which Senator Leahy was also the lead author. The proposed amendment brings the act into the 21st century by adding email, cell phone, private messages on social ...

This seems to be the week for legal blog posts. After trying a slightly revised version of COICA with new branding (now: PROTECT IP), Senator Leahy has come out with a very sensible piece of legislation, the ECPA Amendments Act of 2011. As the name says, this is is an amendment to the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986 for which Senator Leahy was also the lead author. The proposed amendment brings the act into the 21st century by adding email, cell phone, private messages on social ...

I wrote a blog post last week about the current Privacy Theater in the US, where the government is simultaneously pushing stricter privacy regulations and huge backdoors that would completely undermine privacy. The backdoors come in the form of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act or CISPA. The folks at Lumin Consulting have put together a good infographic that illustrates how CISPA undermines privacy: I am actually sympathetic to the basic idea behind CISPA, which is to make it ...

I wrote a blog post last week about the current Privacy Theater in the US, where the government is simultaneously pushing stricter privacy regulations and huge backdoors that would completely undermine privacy. The backdoors come in the form of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act or CISPA. The folks at Lumin Consulting have put together a good infographic that illustrates how CISPA undermines privacy: I am actually sympathetic to the basic idea behind CISPA, which is to make it ...

I wrote recently about how we are at a time during which lots of little decisions will determine whether we find ourselves in an information utopia or dystopia. There is a lot of legislation in the works both here in the US and abroad that speaks directly to this. In particular, there is a schizophrenic approach to privacy. We are simultaneously getting efforts to provide more privacy in commercial settings and less privacy vis-a-vis the government. In the US, the FTC is working on new privac...

I wrote recently about how we are at a time during which lots of little decisions will determine whether we find ourselves in an information utopia or dystopia. There is a lot of legislation in the works both here in the US and abroad that speaks directly to this. In particular, there is a schizophrenic approach to privacy. We are simultaneously getting efforts to provide more privacy in commercial settings and less privacy vis-a-vis the government. In the US, the FTC is working on new privac...

The Do Not Track discussions that are currently going on are fascinating because they highlight the huge gap between how the internet actually works and how people are talking about policy. Politicians are giving consumers a false sense that there is an easy “on/off” switch for tracking. And industry groups aren’t helping the debate by making it easy to argue that they are using self policing as a fig leave. All of this completely drowns out the difficulty of the underlying problem: our onlin...

The Do Not Track discussions that are currently going on are fascinating because they highlight the huge gap between how the internet actually works and how people are talking about policy. Politicians are giving consumers a false sense that there is an easy “on/off” switch for tracking. And industry groups aren’t helping the debate by making it easy to argue that they are using self policing as a fig leave. All of this completely drowns out the difficulty of the underlying problem: our onlin...

I woke up this morning thinking that I should write a post on privacy, having read Fred’s post and danah boyd’s two posts over the weekend and Charlie’s post this morning. Then I realized, I should probably check what I have written about privacy here before, since it seems to be a recurring topic. So I re-read my own post from March of 2009 and concluded that my thinking hasn’t changed enough since to warrant a new post. The key quote is this:I believe what we are seeing is the transition fr...

I woke up this morning thinking that I should write a post on privacy, having read Fred’s post and danah boyd’s two posts over the weekend and Charlie’s post this morning. Then I realized, I should probably check what I have written about privacy here before, since it seems to be a recurring topic. So I re-read my own post from March of 2009 and concluded that my thinking hasn’t changed enough since to warrant a new post. The key quote is this:I believe what we are seeing is the transition fr...

I love the duality of the Jeffrey Rosen piece about the End of Forgetting in the NY Times Sunday magazine with the release of the Afghanistan files via Wikileaks. Citizens and governments are faced with a fundamental challenge to privacy and secrecy. This is not a change in degree, like the advent of photo copiers compared to hand-cranked ink paper (yup, old enough to have used that!). It is a completely different world and many individuals and almost all institutions are in denial about how ...

I love the duality of the Jeffrey Rosen piece about the End of Forgetting in the NY Times Sunday magazine with the release of the Afghanistan files via Wikileaks. Citizens and governments are faced with a fundamental challenge to privacy and secrecy. This is not a change in degree, like the advent of photo copiers compared to hand-cranked ink paper (yup, old enough to have used that!). It is a completely different world and many individuals and almost all institutions are in denial about how ...