How They Scored

This article on Streetsblog , a progressive pro-bicycle and transit website, is fascinating. The lengthy piece, worth reading in its entirety, explains how Streetsblog staff uncovered the identity of a hyperactive negative commenter with his own website, Commuter Outrage. Evidently the man behind Commuter Outrage, a twenty-something conservative who works in a civilian job at the Pentagon, was digging up material for his screeds during work hours using his employer's (and the government's) resources, and Streetsblog's questions about these practices quickly led the secretive fellow to disappear the entire Commuter Outrage website. Instructive were the easy-to-understand steps taken by Streetsblog staff to uncover the man's identity, along with evidence that suggested he was blogging on his employer's time. Also interesting was the fact that the attacks by Commuter Outrage and its putative staff (really just this one fellow, apparently) were not some right-wing consp...

According to this article , some employers not only are searching the internet for discouraging information on you, but a few companies have asked interviewees for their passwords to their social networking accounts. What in holy Christ. For many people, I think the choice would not be whether or not to give up this information. It would be whether or not to reply calmly, "Why do you want that?" or flipping the bird and walking out. I accept that whatever I put on the internet has to be regarded as public knowledge. If I post it, it's there for anyone to see. I might put a warning on it, or I might hide it behind an obscure or invisible link, but some search bot will find it and display it on search results. I accept that. Indeed, I'm more concerned about someone getting me mixed up with the other Mark Pritchards of the world than I am of someone finding something I did in the past. That's because I've always lived an open life. I'm bisexual, I write porn...

Just as I predicted in How They Scored: Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines. -- Kara Swisher, All Things D

Not long after I started using Twitter, I started to wonder: Why? Imagine the familiar movie scenario where a detective is desperate to track and find a suspect, or where a detective is hired by a suspicious spouse to trail their errant husband or wife. Or an alternate scenario from the Cold War, where the secret police manipulate ordinary citizens to inform on one another (cf. the film The Lives of Others , pictured at left). Or the horrible situation of a controlling husband who wants to know where his wife is at every minute of the day. In those situations, one person wants to track another; the person who is tracked would rather not be tracked and sometimes would do anything to avoid it. Now consider yourself, or any ordinary bourgeois, and how much you are tracked on a daily (and sometimes minute-to-minute) basis. Credit card companies and credit reporting firms register every purchase you make with something other than cash. Airlines, grocery stores and other businesses with rew...

A survey rated companies on privacy , with Google "conspicuously absent" from the top 10. I love that the US Postal Service was included. Frankly, I do trust the post office more than, say, Google. A vast bureaucracy plus a unionized workforce equals nice slow responses to court orders.

This is just the kind of thing I wrote about in my book: Microsoft ponders offline profiling of Web users By John Letzing, MarketWatch Last update: 7:02 p.m. EST Jan. 23, 2008 SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Microsoft Corp. is developing a method of using personal data such as credit-card information to target Internet users with advertising once they connect to the Web, according to a patent application filed by the company. In an application disclosed earlier this month, a Microsoft team including Chairman Bill Gates presents a method of collecting information about users' "cell phones, geolocation systems, credit-card information" and other data sources to select and display "targeted advertising." The technology described in the patent application touches on a delicate issue for Microsoft and other online companies such as Google Inc. Microsoft and its rivals have all sought to gather increasing amounts of personal information about Internet users to deliver...

From an interview with a privacy expert on the Google-DoubleClick merger : There are two key elements to a profile. Most people tend to focus on the Big Brother data collection side, and that's simply taking information about a person from different aspects of their private life: their medical records, their financial records, where they go online, what they put in e-mail, who they call -- all that kind of information that can be put together to create a detailed profile of an individual. But the second part -- which I don't think people think about very much but in many respects is becoming more important -- is the algorithm that is put on top of that data and the decisions that are made [based on an analysis of the information]. That's actually an area that EPIC is spending a lot more time on these days, because if you look at such questions as which banner ads an Internet user sees when they visit a Web site, or whether an airline passenger is pulled aside for secondary ...