Why Privacy Matters, Even If You Have Nothing To Hide, by Daniel J. Solove
The nothing-to-hide argument pervades discussions about privacy. The data-security expert Bruce Schneier calls it the "most common retort against privacy advocates." ... To evaluate the nothing-to-hide argument, we should begin by looking at how its adherents understand privacy. Nearly every law or policy involving privacy depends upon a particular understanding of what privacy is. The way problems are conceived has a tremendous impact on the legal and policy solutions used to solve them.
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posted by the man of twists and turns
on Dec 9, 2012 -
67 comments
The Touch-point Collective: Crowd Contouring on the Casino Floor -
'Historically, casinos have been eager adopters of technologies that help them to gather knowledge about their customers. The knowledge-gathering repertoire of the modern casino has shifted from telephone surveys, focus groups, and rudimentary datasets to complex feats of reconnaissance and analysis enabled by player tracking systems, data visualization tools, and behavioral intelligence software suites. Many surveillance techniques first applied in casinos were only later adapted to other domains—airports, financial trading floors, shopping malls, banks, and government agencies.' There are some large, embedded .avi files in the page, be careful.
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posted by the man of twists and turns
on Aug 6, 2012 -
13 comments
Big Data On Campus (NYTimes) “We don’t want to turn into just eHarmony,” says Michael Zimmer, assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he studies ethical dimensions of new technology. “I’m worried that we’re taking both the richness and the serendipitous aspect of courses and professors and majors — and all the things that are supposed to be university life — and instead translating it into 18 variables that spit out, ‘This is your best fit. So go over here.’ ”
posted by OmieWise
on Jul 23, 2012 -
23 comments
In
The Geographic Flow of Music (
arxiv), researchers Conrad Lee and Pádraig Cunningham propose a method to use data from the
last.fm API to track the world's listening habits by location and time, showing where shifts in musical tastes have originated and subsequently migrated. Results show music trends originating in smaller cities and flowing outward in unexpected ways, contradicting some assumptions in social science about larger cities being more efficient engines of (cultural) invention.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Apr 26, 2012 -
13 comments
With a “chief scientist” specializing in consumer behavior, an “analytics department” monitoring voter trends, and a squad of dozens huddled at computer screens editing video or writing code, the sprawling office complex inside One Prudential Plaza looks like a corporate research and development lab — Ping-Pong table and all. But it is home to the largely secret engine of President Obama’s re-election campaign, where scores of political strategists, data analysts, corporate marketers and Web producers are sifting through information gleaned from Facebook, voter logs and hundreds of thousands of telephone or in-person conversations to reassemble and re-energize the scattered coalition of supporters who swept Mr. Obama into the White House four years ago.
posted by Trurl
on Mar 9, 2012 -
59 comments
Datamining Shakespeare ---
Othello is a Shakespearean tragedy: when the hero makes a terrible mistake of judgment, his once promising world is led into ruin. Computer analysis of the play, however, suggests that the play is a comedy or, at least, that it does the same things with words that comedies usually do.
On October 26, 2011,
Folger Shakespeare Library Director
Michael Witmore discussed his recent work in Shakespeare studies which combines computer analysis of texts, linguistics, and traditional literary history. Taking the case of Shakespeare's genres as a starting point, Witmore shows how subtle human judgments about the kinds of plays Shakespeare wrote — were they
comedies,
histories or
tragedies? — are connected to frequent, widely distributed features in the playwright's syntax, vocabulary, and diction. (approx. 30 minute lecture.)
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posted by crunchland
on Dec 8, 2011 -
29 comments
Oren Etzioni is a renowned data mining expert who sold Farecast, his airline-ticket price predictor to Microsoft for $115 million. Now he's turned his focus to the general problem of finding when the best shopping bargains occur. Punch in a consumer electronics item and his
website will tell you whether to buy now or to wait. Over time he'll be adding more product categories. In any case, he can tell you right now
the best prices for most things aren't on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
posted by storybored
on Dec 1, 2011 -
14 comments
"The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin. Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say —
of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones."
posted by Scoop
on Mar 26, 2011 -
45 comments
Social Networks and Data Mining: Where it is and Where it's Going Telecoms operators naturally prize mobile-phone subscribers who spend a lot, but some thriftier customers, it turns out, are actually more valuable. Known as “influencers”, these subscribers frequently persuade their friends, family and colleagues to follow them when they switch to a rival operator. The trick, then, is to identify such trendsetting subscribers and keep them on board with special discounts and promotions. People at the top of the office or social pecking order often receive quick callbacks, do not worry about calling other people late at night and tend to get more calls at times when social events are most often organised, such as Friday afternoons. Influential customers also reveal their clout by making long calls, while the calls they receive are generally short. Companies can spot these influencers, and work out all sorts of other things about their customers, by crunching vast quantities of calling data with sophisticated “network analysis” software. Instead of looking at the call records of a single customer at a time, it looks at customers within the context of their social network.
posted by Weebot
on Sep 4, 2010 -
22 comments
The National Security Agency is building a
data center in San Antonio that’s the size of the Alamodome. Microsoft has opened an
11-acre data center a few miles away. Coincidence? Not according to author
James Bamford, who probably knows more about the NSA than any outsider. Bamford's
new book reports that the biggest U.S. spy agency wanted assurances that Microsoft would be in San Antonio before it moved ahead with the
Texas Cryptology Center. Bamford notes that under current law, the NSA could legally tap into Microsoft’s data without a court order. Whatever you do, don't take pictures of it the spy building unless you
want to be taken in for questioning.
posted by up in the old hotel
on Dec 8, 2008 -
42 comments
Arguing Against Datamining MySpace in search of Pedophiles. In certain circles,
MySpace
has become the villain de jour for all sorts of debauchery
(
threatening
the President,
phishing
,
dismembered
women , etc.), as well as being fertile hunting grounds for the
pedophile. Given the
huge
size of MySpace, reported as 100 million accounts (although
estimates
of active accounts are far lower, at approximately 43 million ), and an
hypothetical and absurdly low natural incidence of pedophiles and pedarasts
(let's say just 1%), one could assume that there could be as many as 430,000
to 1,000,000 of them out there. Wired
contributor and reformed hacker (Kevin Poulson) has developed a script to weed
out the bad seeds
[
via].
His script was effective, although it took several months of sifting and
refining, as well as numerous false positives - 744 registered sex offenders,
497 with convictions for crimes against children. While such an
experiment has merit, how much time, resources, and law enforcement manpower
will be wasted chasing down the
""high-cost
"false positives", and what will be neglected and sacrificed for that
effort?
posted by rzklkng
on Oct 16, 2006 -
38 comments
Exploring enron -- A breathtaking web of conspiratorial email messages. How often did Jeff Skilling email Ken Lay? How often were those emails about company business? Internal alliances? The company's allegiance? The California energy crisis? Who else was talking about it? Who wasn't?
Temptingly complete with software download and MySQL tables for your own tinfoil hat explorations.
posted by boo_radley
on Jun 13, 2005 -
10 comments
Docusearch settles claim for 75K with family whose daughter was
killed by
a stalker who
purchased her personal information from them -- a killer whose intentions were described on a Googleable website. The
NH Supreme Court determined
last year that
Docusearch, the company who sold
Amy Boyer's work address and SSN to her killer could be held
liable for her death, even though some of that information was publicly available. An "Amy Boyer's Law" intended to increase privacy by restricting the display, sale or use of SSNs received
negative reviews by privacy organizations and ultimately was
removed from an appropriations bill. In a statement, Amy's parents encourage others to use the Internet to keep track of who may be keeping track of their kids. "
If only we had typed our daughter's name into any search engine, the Amy Boyer Web site that was posted by her killer would have come up, and we could have called the police...This may never have happened."
posted by jessamyn
on Mar 11, 2004 -
6 comments
