SuccessfulWorkplace

We joined Snapchat during the holidays. Ironically, after waiting so long to try it out, we did so one day before the New Years Eve security breach. Are we shocked that Snapchat provided people with a false sense of security? Not really. The Internet has shown us repeatedly that cyberspace follows the same rules that […]

We’re in the Data Age. Everything is suddenly digitally quantifiable and that raises profound questions about privacy, what we can know about ourselves and what others can know about us. The very idea of information’s discovery, ownership and use is undergoing fundamental change in a world of suddenly archaic laws and government structures. Here are […]

Last week, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, warned that the Internet is threatened by a growing tide of surveillance and censorship. In the Foundation’s annual Web Index Report, it was reported that, “…94% of countries in the Index do not meet best practice standards for checks and balances on government […]

Derrick Harris wrote up a great piece for GigaOm today, Pondering Privacy, Part 2: Let’s get over ourselves already. In his article, he argues the following: While the work privacy advocates do to highlight the tactics and implications of online data collection is commendable, it’s a little misleading. No, it’s not ideal that companies and […]

The Web and Big Data are making the world a much smaller place. Uncomfortably small in some cases. As reported in the NY Times, many sites have sprung up across the Internet that post mugshots online in what could be best described as extortion…they’ll take them down for a fee. What truly makes it extortion […]

The following is a guest post by Alistair Croll. I posted this on Facebook but it belongs here instead. There’s a meme running around that somehow the iPhone fingerprint scanner uploads your biometrics to Apple’s servers. The way these things work is that your fingerprint is turned into a series of numbers, usually through a one-way mathematical […]

The following is a guest post by Alistair Croll. A couple of years ago, I spoke with an European Union diplomat who shall remain nameless about the governing body’s attitude to privacy. “Do you know why the French hate traffic cameras?” he asked me. “It’s because it makes it hard for them to cheat on their […]

Kashmir Hill’s piece in Forbes, The Terrifying Search Engine That Finds Internet-Connected Cameras, Traffic Lights, Medical Devices, Baby Monitors and Power Plants, reports on a search engine, Shodan, built for the purpose of crawling for devices on the Internet, many of which are programmed to answer and are sometimes easy to hack. Among the devices […]

Technology makes it easier than ever to spy on citizens, as we saw with the NSA’s Prism and other (…domestic) surveillance programs. By extension, technology also makes it easier to spy on just about anyone we have some control over, including employees and our loved ones, especially our children. Last week, we received an ad […]

If you live in California and had your phone turned on one evening last week, you were probably startled to get a text from the statewide system that alerts residents to emergencies. Boulevard, CA AMBER Alert UPDATE: LIC/6WCU986 (CA) Blue Nissan Versa 4 door While it was startling for many, what it showed us was […]

The following is a guest post by Alistair Croll. Recently, I wrote a post about big data and civil rights, which seems to have hit a nerve. It was posted on Solve for Interesting and on Radar, and then folks like Boing Boing picked it up. I haven’t had this kind of response to a post before (well, I’ve had […]

The following is a guest post by Alistair Croll. Data doesn’t invade people’s lives. Lack of control over how it’s used does. What’s really driving so-called big data isn’t the volume of information. It turns out big data doesn’t have to be all that big. Rather, it’s about a reconsideration of the fundamental economics of analyzing […]

As the NSA PRISM debacle continues to unfold and spreads across continents it’s probably good to stop and think about the technology and philosophy behind it all. Because this is big data and analytics in its most potent and controversial form and it’s certainly not the last time we’ll see this hit the headlines. The […]

The brouhaha over NSA’s PRISM project that involved spying on Verizon customers and asking Silicon Valley giants for access to their customer records is a bit of false indignation, if you ask me (what, you didn’t ask me?). First, there have been warnings for years about our loss of privacy. Secondly, and may more importantly, […]