Beautiful Alarmism
By Ryan Calo on January 31, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Privacy has become one of the defining issue of the Information Age. CIS has received national recognition for its interdisciplinary and multi-angle examination of privacy, particularly as it relates to emerging technology.
By Ryan Calo on January 31, 2009 at 4:29 pm
By Ryan Calo on January 29, 2009 at 3:05 pm
As part of Data Privacy Day 2009, the Center for Internet and Society hosted a Privacy Policy Workshop, sponsored by Covington & Burling LLP. I've attached our PowerPoint slide deck. You can follow along to an audio recording of the event by clicking here.
We had a great turn out and a lot of interesting questions. Thanks to Covington & Burling LLP, especially Mali Friedman for her presentation, and to Intel, especially Jolynn Dellinger, for coordinating Data Privacy Day. Read more about Privacy Policy Workshop: PowerPoint & Audio
By Ryan Calo on January 21, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Please visit the Center for Internet and Society's new wiki (cyberlaw.stanford.edu/wiki) and contribute to our privacy enhancing technology (PET) database.
Stanford Law School student Seth Gilmore got us started on a PET wiki. As the name suggests, PETs are technologies or techniques that assist users in protecting their information from abuse. They include software allowing for anonymous surfing, plug-ins that reveal who is tracking you online, and improvements in browser security. Microsoft and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada cosponsor an award for PETs, and there is a call for papers (due March 2, 2009) for an upcoming PET conference in Seattle. Read more about Database Of Privacy Enhancing Technologies
By Ryan Calo on January 11, 2009 at 3:16 pm
David Cancel just created a wonderful privacy enhancing technology for Firefox---up there with Ad Blocker Plus in my view. In a simple and straightforward way, Ghostery reveals who is tracking your views of a page on the Internet according to a common but under-examined method: web bugs.
As David explains, "[w]eb bugs are used to track your behavior on the web in order to help the sites you visit to understand their own audiences and to allow advertisers to target ads at you." To expand a little, web bugs are tiny (generally one-pixel) pictures on a web page that tell a host or third-party when and by whom they are being loaded, which in turn reveals that the page itself has been loaded. David's elegant plug-in "scans the web pages you visit to find web bugs" and displays their owners in the upper right hand corner of the page. Ghostery is easy to install, use, and shut off. Read more about Ghostery.com: Not Just A Cool Icon