Logical Extremes

The beginning of Facebook's long slow decline?

2010-05-11T11:21:00.005-06:00

Nothing lasts forever. Facebook's rapid growth has been accompanied by steadily eroding privacy, with particularly nasty changes in December and again just last month. And who knows what will happen in the future.

The Facebook Zeitgeist for May 2010

Why do most people go to Facebook? To share with friends and family, and to play games. OK, maybe not so much the games as time marches on:

And, well, as Danny Sullivan observes, maybe not so much sharing either as people realize how little Facebook respects their ability to make choices and exert control over the online aspects of their lives:

Don't have a Facebook account yet? It's never too late to join in the fun.

Want to help accelerate the trends? There are always the nuclear options.

Facebook: The Nuclear Options

2010-04-25T18:21:00.011-06:00

Have you had it with Facebook's shenanigans? There are a few options short of quitting your browser and turning off your computer forever.

1. Log out of Facebook

Facebook recently made it harder to logout, moving the Logout link from an easy and obvious place on the main page, into the Account menu in the upper right:

Why? Maybe it was to give you and your friends the ultimate user experience (so, about that bridge I was talking to you about...). Maybe it was to maximize off-site interactions with Facebook Platform. Who knows, maybe removing it altogether isn't so far-fetched after all.

2. Block Facebook Cookies

Both Firefox and Chrome standard configurations allow you to block cookies on a site by site basis. In Safari, the best you can do without an add-on is to disable 3rd-party cookies and clear cookies when you quit (and quit often).

In Firefox Preferences > Privacy tab, click on the "Exceptions..." button for cookies:

Similarly, in Chrome Preferences, go to "Under the Hood" > Privacy "Content Settings..." > Cookies tab:

From there, "Exceptions"will allow you to block all cookies for any specified site(s):

You can still view public pages on Facebook without cookies, but it keeps Facebook from being able to follow you around (assuming it isn't doing more nefarious tracking by browser fingerprinting or other such methods). But if you want to still be able to log in from time to time, you could isolate your Facebook usage to a special browser and use a different browser with Facebook cookies blocked for all of your other surfing.

3. Block Facebook in your hosts file

This one is a little more technical and I won't get into all the details in this post, but the added advantage is blocking Facebook across all ports and applications on your (real or virtual) machine. Simply add a few lines to your hosts file:

127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com



127.0.0.1       facebook.com

Since the hosts file uses servers and not domains, unfortunately you'll need to block each Facebook subdomain in a separate line. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to identify all such subdomains.

4. Block Facebook at the DNS level

To accomplish roughly the same thing for all of your machines at once, you can block Facebook at the level of your DNS server (or with a proxy server). One free and easy DNS service is OpenDNS, which, after a simple sign-up (and an app to sync your IP address if you have dynamic IP), allows you to blacklist up to 25 whole domains (you don't have to worry about individual servers or subdomains if you don't want to).

5. Temporarily Deactivate Your Account

This one is a fairly obvious alternative, though a bit buried in the menus:

Then, you just have to keep your nerve to make it through the guilt trip gauntlet:

Did you make it through? Great! Now you've bought yourself some time to reflect on life, the universe, and everything.

6. Permanently Delete Your Account

When all else fails (though you may still want to do some blocking of cookies, servers, or domains), there's always the most nuclear of nuclear options... Delete My Account:

What's the worst that could happen? You change your mind later, or (miracle of miracles) Facebook cleans up its act, and you start from scratch with a wiser perspective.

"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

So You Want to Make a Facebook Account?

2010-04-23T21:22:00.008-06:00

[This post is a follow-up to "Google: Good Privacy Starts with Good Account Creation"]

Once upon a time, when Facebook was still a private place for college friends to share, sign-up was easy:

And in those good old days, you could fully exercise your right to privacy, with only two exceptions: your Name and your Networks were always considered public. Now there's a little more to it:

Facebook thrives on real world identities. It used to be more for privacy and security, but now that a half billion people are locked in, these days it seems more like it's for crossing the offline and online streams to create a really meaty digital dossier for marketers (and who knows what other purposes).

About the birthday, and "Why do I need to provide this?":

It's an open secret that some users don't enter their real DOB. While I wouldn't encourage anyone to artificially increase their age to bypass legal compliance issues, I would definitely encourage anyone who does not plan to show their birth date to friends to choose a date that puts them well under 18. Why? You get additional privacy protections not available to the general public.

Choose your name wisely too. Facebook really wants your real name and actively weeds out accounts using pseudonyms (with the expected collateral damage), but a lucky few people do manage to fly under the radar. There are no easy second chances. If you try to change your name later, it takes manual intervention from a Facebook employee:

That's it? Well, no. Once you confirm your registration, you'll be guided through additional personal information gathering, much of which you can skip, but certain things are required. Ultimately, choose carefully when you add information to any field that becomes what Facebook calls "Publicly Available Information " (PAI):

Name
Profile Picture
Gender
Current City
Networks
Friend List
Pages

Also remember that Pages now includes "Connections" created by information entered in certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests".

What does it mean for your personal information to be PAI? It means that even if you do manage for it not to show in your profile or in Facebook search or in public search, it may still be accessed by Facebook-enabled applications and websites. There's a clue in all of that about where Facebook's priorities are.

Now we're done, right? Well, actually before you fill out your profile you should review your privacy settings, so nothing slips out before you get your setings the way you want.

Be sure to visit all of the sections that affect your privacy. The layout is subject to change, but the basics should be accessible from here:

http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy

It can take quite a while to wade through all of the settings, there are many screens, many menus, and many clicks, and odds are you won't have full confidence in what's really going to happen with certain settings, so unfortunately you have to take your best shot and hope it works like you think.

Like with the PAI discussed above, there are certain choices that are just not available any longer. For example, you used to be able to block any new friend requests, but now the best you can do is limit it to Friends of Friends:

Similarly, there's no longer any way to opt out of Facebook messages (Facebook likes to keep your interactions all in the family):

Congratulations! You now have a working Facebook account. Only the basics have been covered here. Be sure to review the Terms and explore the Privacy Resources, including the actual Privacy Policy (which changes regularly). After all, this is presumably your real world identity and reputation Facebook now has significant control over. With so much more at stake, understanding how it all works –not a trivial task– is critical.

UPDATE 26 April 2010: Inside Facebook reports:

"Some new users signing up for Facebook are starting to see Pages integrated into the process, including the number of other people who like each Page... One note is that all of these Pages appear to be public by default, something new users may not realize as the fact isn’t disclosed within the sign-up process."

Yet another auto-opt-in gotcha for unsuspecting new users who may not want to publicize that kind of activity but don't yet have the knowledge to effectively manage the settings or even understand the implications.

Related Posts:
Facebook: the Nuclear Options
Google: Good Privacy Starts with Good Account Creation

Google: Good Privacy Starts with Good Account Creation

2010-04-22T10:43:00.004-06:00

It's much easier for a site to be privacy-friendly when it doesn't collect more information than it needs to operate its services. Keep in mind that many Google services don't even require an account (or cookies for that matter) to perform their basic functions. But when you do need or want an account (or another account - you can have multiple Google accounts and multiple Gmail addresses), Google is a good example of privacy-friendly account creation:

https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount

Note that Google doesn't ask for very much information:

+ Current email address (this becomes your login name)
+ Password (at least 8 characters)
+ Location (your country, chosen from a menu)
+ Birthday (mm/dd/yy)

Followed by a word verification to thwart bots, and a button to click to agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. That's it.

Note that there is NO mention of Birthday in the Terms of Service. most privacy-savvy users already know there is no requirement to provide a real date of birth to most commercial services.

A basic Google Account can be extended with Gmail. In this case, Google asks for an additional (minimal) set of information):

+ First Name
+ Last Name
+ Desired Login Name (this becomes your Gmail address @gmail.com)
+ Security Question & Answer (choose a question from the menu, or make up your own)
+ OPTIONAL Recovery email address

Again followed by a word verification to thwart bots, and a button to click to agree to the Terms of Service, the Gmail Program Policy, and the Privacy Policy. That's it.

Again note that there is NO mention of Name (or Birthday) in the Terms of Service or the Gmail Program Policy. You can use your real name or a pseudonym. Google doesn't care.

From a privacy perspective, the freedom to choose what information you provide to a service to create your account is absolutely critical. Your privacy risk is inherently greater with services that require more, and more specific, personal information.

A [future] Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg

2010-03-29T17:03:00.002-06:00

A [draft] Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg, dated several months from now: Friday, June 4, 2010:

You guys are a bunch of ungrateful whiny-ass titty-baby Luddites. Seriously. You should have stopped us while you still had a chance. The Age of Privacy is Over. WE PWN YOU...

...Once again, we're giving you notice and beginning the process of ~~ignoring~~ listening to your feedback... Here are some of the biggest updates...

Enhanced Login...

Premium Accounts...

Richer Profiles...

Enhanced Presence...

Enhanced Identity...

...I know what's good for Facebook, I know what's good for America, I know what's good for the world, and I certainly I know what's good for you... better than you do. Arrogant? No. Just too big to fail. Look kids, it's my way or the highway.

More at the link: http://nihilister.com/fb-parody.html

P.S. In case it's not obvious, this is parody.

Blocking Adobe Flash® for Fun and Profit

2009-11-15T14:00:00.005-06:00

Blocking Flash elements on a web page not only has performance advantages (page load time, CPU usage, power-battery-heat-fan, etc.), but it is also one of several basic necessities for web privacy.

FlashBlock is an extension for Firefox that replaces each flash element on a page with a click-to-load button. It gives you full control to only load the elements you really want, and has a whitelist to bypass blocking on specific sites.

ClickToFlash is a freeware (donations accepted) WebKit plug-in alternative for Safari on Mac OS X. Is has similar one-click Flash loading and a whitelist, but also has a preference that lets you force YouTube to load h.264 video instead of Flash, ~~with no extra click needed~~. Be sure to customize the settings, particularly by unclicking the "Automatically load invisible Flash views" box, which will then also block small (< 8x8 pixel) Flash bugs.

FlashBlock and ClickToFlash addresses the performance issues, and to some small extent privacy by limiting the number of Flash elements that can access your hard drive, but more controls are needed to address even basic privacy concerns.

Adobe Flash is nearly ubiquitous on personal computers and very few people are aware of, let alone know how to effectively manage, the extensive and intrusive Local Stored Objects (AKA LSOs, Flash cookies, or Persistent Identification Elements - PIE) it reads and writes on your hard drive. Even Adobe's own (obscure) web-based management tool is incomplete and not effective for all scenarios. Find the Macromedia folder on your system... you may be quite surprised what, and how much, you find there. These files can store large amounts of personalized data, and they can be accessed across browsers (and potentially by other applications too). In other words, a Flash cookie set by a web site you browsed to in Safari can be read by a web site you later browse to in Firefox.

There are a variety of procedures and tools for managing Flash "cookies", but the BetterPrivacy extension for Firefox is one of the easiest and most complete.

BetterPrivacy is a simple tool to manage both Flash cookies and DOM Storage (another kind of obscure but persistent file read and written by web sites). It let's you choose to delete Flash cookies and their directories on browser start-up, exit, and even on a timed interval (as long as the browser is open). Again, be sure to customize the settings.

Unless (or until) web sites better disclose and provide opt-outs and major browsers build in controls for effectively managing these persistent files, I'll continue to use the nuclear option: keeping these and all other kinds of tracking data purged on a regular basis.

Surveillance via Blank Paper

2009-11-12T13:49:00.000-06:00

How do I surveille thee?* Let me count the ways...™

Be careful what you do with that nice shiny new ream of paper:

We introduce a new method for measuring the three-dimensional surface of a page using only a commodity scanner and without modifying the document in any way. From this physical feature, we generate a concise fingerprint that uniquely identifies the document. Our technique is secure against counterfeiting and robust to harsh handling; it can be used even before any content is printed on a page. It has a wide range of applications, including detecting forged currency and tickets, authenticating passports, and halting counterfeit goods. Document identification could also be applied maliciously to de-anonymize printed surveys and to compromise the secrecy of paper ballots.

Surveillance via License Plates

2009-11-11T12:23:00.001-06:00

How do I surveille thee?* Let me count the ways...™

Just when you thought it was safe to go for a drive:

If you are behind the wheel of your car, someone may be on to you. More and more cities are equipping patrol officers, toll booths and even access roads with computer sidekicks that can keep track of vehicle movements... Automated license-plate-recognition systems (ALPRs) mounted in patrol cars are capable of processing 1,500 license plates a minute, capturing a vast amount of data about the movements of both criminals and law-abiding citizens.

Los Angeles joins an expanding list of areas using some kind of automated license-plate-recognition systems (some examples: Memphis, DC, Tiburon California, UK). And if optical scanning wasn't bad enough, the US DOT wants to develop an RFID-enabled license plate:

The U.S. Department of Transportation's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program has posted online its solicitation for the fiscal year. The document includes a project for the development of a radio frequency-enabled license-plate system that would assist government agencies in the enforcement of traffic laws... but it's also important to ensure that people aren't tracked without their knowledge for nefarious reasons. A female rider, for instance, could be tracked with the technology by a stalker. This is one concern with the PASS Card program, in fact—the tags can be read from 20 or 30 feet away without anyone's knowledge, and if you can associate a random serial number with, say, Mark Roberti, then you could use RFID to track Mark Roberti.

But as Nicole Ozer, a technology expert for the California ACLU told the San Francisco Chronicle:

Innocent people should be able to go about their daily lives without being tracked and monitored.

Surveillance via Hair

2009-11-10T13:11:00.000-06:00

How do I surveille thee?* Let me count the ways...™

It may now be possible to establish a geolocation trail by analyzing hair:

A group of researchers from the LGC Chemical Metrology Laboratory in the UK havs teamed up with the University of Oviedo, Spain. Together they have developed a "laser ablation" method that makes it possible “to detect variations in the sulfur isotopes of a single hair over time”, says Science Daily. This means that scientists will be able to track a person’s movements between different countries, as the sulphur isotopes reveal changes in eating habits.

2 Essential features for Google Wave clients

2009-06-03T15:20:00.021-06:00

Google Wave looks to be a very impressive and promising product, continuing in Google's tradition of supporting open protocols on the internet. Wave has the potential to become an easy replacement for many use cases of email, IM, and social networking services like Facebook and Twitter.

But to truly succeed and give users the full control they currently have in email and IM (and in most other Google services), client applications will need to be a bit richer than those shown in the initial demos.

Wave clients will need:

• The ability to handle multiple accounts, much like 3rd-party email and IM clients do today. I know very few people with only one email or IM account. The reasons vary... work vs. personal, legacy addresses, branding and identity, spam control, etc., but it won't be too long before people start having more than one Wave-capable account and need a way to aggregate them. Particularly since Wave may well take the place of (or at least augment) other forms of social communication and collaboration, this aggregation within the client will quickly become critical.

• A POP-like ability to download and locally store waves. Maybe this is accomplished through something like Google Gears offline access, but ideally it's something more open and interoperable like a subset of Wave server features being implemented in the client. Clearly, many larger companies will want to run their own Wave servers rather than use a commercial service. But individuals and smaller organizations will also want local offline content. Otherwise their content is at the mercy of a commercial service in the cloud staying operational, not losing data, and not locking them out of their account for whatever reason. Most intelligent people keep multiple copies of important content, including a local copy. Wave conversations are no different.

Many people will simply use a browser-based Wave interface much of the time (and of course this is anticipated to be a key vector for Google and others to monetize the service), but if Wave is to become a significant means through which we direct our online attention, it will need to have the at least the same degrees of flexibility and robustness that we have enjoyed with email and IM clients.

Take Control of your Digital Dossier

2009-05-20T15:56:00.023-06:00

Gina Trapani has a good post up on Lifehacker: Break Google's Monopoly on Your Data: Switch to Yahoo Search, focusing on how to diversify your online life a bit by mixing up your searches across services. The article goes into quite a bit of detail comparing Google and Yahoo! search results.

I've written before about basic browser privacy and geolocation. I've also outlined many tips for diversifying your digital egg basket and managing some of the data that makes its way into your digital dossier.

I want to use this post to highlight some additional tools to augment some of those practices.

Clearly, the best solution for search privacy is to do all searches from an alternate browser that is not logged in to any commercial service, rejects all 3rd-party cookies, and automatically clears all personalized data (especially cookies, cache, and history) upon exit. It's very easy to set up Firefox or Opera for this purpose. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader for now to decide whether to use the Google Chrome browser with or without its special unique identifier technologies.

An interesting Firefox tool for search privacy is TrackMeNot:

TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one's tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view. User-installed TrackMeNot works with the Firefox Browser and popular search engines (AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN) and requires no 3rd-party servers or services.

Track me not also selectively "clicks-through" on non-ad links available in the simulated searches to better mimic real user behavior.

A clean browser as described above is actually a great overall strategy for general browsing. Periodically quitting the browser re-establishes a relatively clean slate. If you prefer to keep your cookies, you can specifically opt-out of advertising tracking cookies one-by-one. But aside from the irony of avoiding some cookies by setting others, this path is fraught with peril as it only works for the browser you do it with, and for only as long as you DON'T purge your cookies. One solution to these problems for Firefox users is the Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO):

This tool sets permanent, generic, non personally identifiable opt-out cookies in the user's browser, which will prevent 40 different online advertising networks (including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) from displaying highly targeted advertisements using the highly detailed information on users' web surfing habits which they collect.

Unlike other earlier opt-out solutions, this tool will make the cookies completely persistent. That is, clearing the browser's cookies will delete all other installed cookies, except these.

While we're on the subject of cookies, don't forget about the particularly insidious Adobe Flash cookies, which few people are even aware of, and even fewer know how to manage:

Flash Player Settings Manager

A Firefox tool to help manage this more easily is BetterPrivacy, which among other things:

...is a Super-Cookie Safeguard which protects from usually undeletable LSO's (Flash-Cookies) or DOM Storage Objects

As Microsoft Silverlight becomes more prevalent, there will need to be similarly increased awareness of its persistent storage and how users can manage it.

If it still sounds like there are too many holes in the process, there's always the nuclear option... completely block all communication with ad (and malware) servers in your hosts file. This works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and covers not only your browsers, but all applications attempting to communicate with servers you deem offensive. It does take some active ongoing management though to achieve a good balance.

It's a good general practice to diversify your use of services and providers, using multiple accounts across different companies. Keep your browsers as clean as practical and change your IP address regularly too.

Questions or further suggestions? Leave a comment.

Surveillance via Neighbors

2009-03-26T09:05:00.002-06:00

How do I surveille thee?* Let me count the ways...™

It's been 25 years since 1984, 18 years since the fall of the iron curtain, and 8 years since 2001, but we still can't party like it's 1999 because someone might think it's terrorism.

In the US, it's utility and government employees acting as Terrorism Liason Officers (or TLO, because everything sinister needs a TLA):

Official anti-terrorism civilian snoop program to be expanded

In the UK, it could be anyone:

Remixes of the paranoid London police suspect your neighbours posters

Related Posts:
Surveillance via Auto Insurance
Surveillance via Residues on Paper
Surveillance via Mobile Phones
Surveillance via Pizza Delivery
Surveillance via Abandoned DNA
Surveillance via Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems

* with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Privacy is only dead for those who choose to have none

2009-01-07T17:34:00.013-06:00

I started to leave a comment on a blog post, Privacy in an Information Abundant World (thoughts on Christian Heller's Embracing Post-Privacy talk at the 25C3 CCC Congress in Berlin), and it turned into this...

The concept of forced full transparency uproots more than two centuries of constitutionally- and otherwise legally-protected rights in the US, and similar (and sometimes greater) protections in many other democratic countries. My personal belief is that it also goes against many elements of human nature, and even in the most "utopian" of societies where everyone would have equal rights and equal technology (worldwide), it wouldn't be desirable.

Most definitions of privacy are vastly oversimplified. Privacy is complex, and contextual. Privacy is not the same as secrecy (and it's not mutually exclusive with security). I'd strongly suggest reading some of Daniel J. Solove's books and articles:

http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dsolove/publications.htm

Bruce Schneier also has some interesting observations on privacy:

"Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect"

"Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance."

"Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy"

See especially these Schneier essays:

- Privacy and Power

- Security vs. Privacy

- The Eternal Value of Privacy

It seems that most of the people who espouse the "privacy is dead" mantra have products or services that benefit more from less privacy. I am not about to yield basic human rights for commercial gain (or "security theater" for that matter). If someone wants to live transparently, that's an individual choice rather a unilateral edict to the rest of society.

[image credit: Panopticon]

Surveillance via Auto Insurance

2008-12-22T15:05:00.008-06:00

How do I surveille thee?* Let me count the ways...™

The problem:

There is a growing movement to surveil the drivers of cars — for insurance purposes. One idea is that vehicle insurance premiums should depend on verifiable, periodic measurements of how far a car has been driven... Another idea is that vehicles should collect data on the way that they are being driven (location, speed, acceleration and braking patterns, type of roads, time of day, smoothness of steering, etc)... The problem with these proposals is that they are often accompanied by a technical proposal for a tracking device that sits in your car and transmits voluminous data over wireless or satellite links, so that insurance companies can decide how much to charge you.

The solution:

Briefly, EFF's view is that there is a perfectly good, ubiquitous and tamper-resistant device avaialable for measuring vehicle mileage: the odometer. It may be good policy to require fine-grained dependence of insurance premiums upon mileage — but if so, the data should be collected by examining odometers rather than 24/7 wireless or satellite surveillance... The best way to protect drivers' privacy, of course, is to not record any facts about where and when and how they are driving at all... If governments are persuaded that they should allow insurers or anybody else to use detailed information on location or other vehicle observations, they should mandate that these schemes not upload any information from vehicles except for the premium itself, and they should require that the privacy properties of any technology being proposed for vehicles be audited by the computer security community before it is deployed.

Related Posts:
Surveillance via Residues on Paper
Surveillance via Mobile Phones
Surveillance via Pizza Delivery
Surveillance via Abandoned DNA
Surveillance via Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems

* with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning

[image credit]

Surveillance via Residues on Paper

2008-11-11T13:19:00.000-06:00

How do I surveille thee?* Let me count the ways...™

PhysOrg.com reports on a chemical process that can transform near lyundetectable residues of fingerprints and inkjet printer ink into visible evidence.

The detection limit is so low that details of a printed letter previously in an envelope could be read off the inside of the envelope...

Keep that in mind next time you casually recycle those envelopes and adjacent sheets of paper.

[via Schneier]

Related Posts:
Surveillance via Mobile Phones
Surveillance via Pizza Delivery
Surveillance via Abandoned DNA
Surveillance via Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems

* with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Surveillance via Mobile Phones

2008-05-27T17:39:00.004-06:00

How do I surveille thee?* Let me count the ways...™

Just when you thought it was safe to go to the mall.

Updates:
- TechCrunch Location Technologies Primer (4 Jun 2008)
- ReadWriteWeb Location Awareness: Scientist Admits to Secretly Tracking 100K+ Peoples' Phones (4 Jun 2008)

[via schneier]

Related Posts:
Surveillance via Pizza Delivery
Surveillance via Abandoned DNA
Surveillance via Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems

* with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Announcing Shyttr.com beta

2008-05-20T09:26:00.008-06:00

With all the talk of signal vs. noise lately, we're announcing a new tool to help you harness the honey wagon of noise:

http://shyttr.com/

Update:
More reasons to love the British [Fake Steve Jobs re:Shitterton]

Related Posts:
Nihilister.com

[Apologies to shyftr]

Surveillance via Pizza Delivery

2008-05-19T11:47:00.009-06:00

How do I surveille thee?* Let me count the ways...™

Consumerist has a privacy Pop Quiz up today: "Can The Pizza Delivery Place Sell Your Personal Information Without Your Consent?"

Interestingly, the ubiquity and frequency of pizza deliveries make these shops ideally situated to collect multiple phone numbers and addresses on their customers, not to mention your topping preferences.

I was quite displeased the first time I called a local shop and they knew my physical delivery address even before I spoke, despite my unlisted phone number and PO Box mailing address.

Related Posts:
Surveillance via Abandoned DNA
Surveillance via Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems

* with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning
[image credit: wikipedia]

In a Twitter about Twitter (gross generalizations)

2008-05-09T10:21:00.007-06:00

A graph of Average Number of Following versus Average Number of Followers among Twitter users:

A funny outlying data point:

Juno: Twitter-condensed movie review

2008-05-03T15:05:00.002-06:00

In 140 characters or less...

Ellen Page is intelligent & quirky. She makes the movie. I want to have her babies. Get the Moldy Peaches tune.

140-character Twitter-sized movie reviews

2008-05-03T14:07:00.003-06:00

It's time to re-introduce commentary on this blog about movies and music, something I haven't really had since my inaugural post.

I've seen a lot of movies. A rough average over one per week (at the theater) over the course of my teen and adult life. Not to mention stuff on TV, and rentals. And my interests are pretty varied. So maybe a way to share this interest with a chronically attention-deficited audience is to try to write Twitter-condensed movie reviews, which I can cross post here and on my Twitter account. Some will be classics, some will be current releases, some will be in between.

We'll see how it goes.

Libertarian Lefties for Obama

2008-04-23T10:27:00.004-06:00

Andrew Sullivan had an insightful post up this morning on the generational divide in this presidential election cycle:

The Millennial Generation

Mainstream candidates don't really appeal broadly to the Libertarian Left, but Obama offers a tempting carrot, as I mention in this open letter to Mr. Sullivan:

"I thought this was an excellent post. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, enough to go to Ron Paul's web site and see where I agree and where I don't. Ron Paul has some interesting positions, but it looks in part like too much religion has crept in. In some ways, I'm an olde skool small-government free-markets Republican. But I'm for Obama this election cycle in a big way. Not because I agree with him on every issue (I don't). But because we need serious process change to move the country back toward a government of, by, and for the people rather than of, by, and for special interests and liberty-crushing authoritarianism."

It will be interesting to see how Obama's economic policies shake out. An Obama presidency may be our best path to a more functional government that would finally be capable of simplifying its bureaucracy and letting individuals and free (but fair) markets set our directions.

In a Twitter about Twitter (cache woes)

2008-04-21T13:45:00.004-06:00

Twitter has been having cache woes for a few days. Your cache is not automatically updating as it should. But you can keep your stream periodically up-to-date by keeping a tab open of another Twitter user, that you don't ordinarily follow (maybe a commercial feed or one in disuse). Any time you want to refresh your queue, follow then immediately unfollow the sacrificial Twitter account, then refresh your own Twitter stream.

[via Colin (cdevroe) via engtech tweet via mashable tweet]

Legitimacy of the Administrative State

2008-04-16T08:37:00.002-06:00

I really dug this conclusion in one of Frank Pasquale's articles today, A Majority of a Third of a Majority Running EPA:

This is one reason why the legitimacy of the administrative state rests not only on political "accountability moments," but on scientific expertise and legal regularity. To the extent these latter two ideals are abandoned, there is little point to giving the executive the expansive powers it's grown accustomed to.

Concurring Opinions is a great read, particularly Daniel Solove's occasional posts on privacy and Frank Pasquale's frequent, thought-provoking posts on just about everything under the sun.

Expelled Gets Exposed

2008-04-14T23:14:00.006-06:00

What Ben Stein isn't telling you about the "documentary" Expelled. [via Pharyngula]

Also very relevant, from Good Math, Bad Math:

Science isn't morality. Science describes what is. Morality defines our understanding of right and wrong. Science doesn't tell us what's morally right and wrong. It tells us what is. It can allows us to reason from what we know, to determine the effect of an action, which can allow us to decide whether that action is morally right or wrong. But the science doesn't tell us what's moral.

What Stein and friends are doing is trying to say that it's appropriate to judge science based on what kinds of moral judgements a lunatic can derive from it - and further, they're basically trying to argue for suppressing the truth when they don't like the results of trying to infer morality from that truth.

UPDATE: More resources exposing the "crockumentary" at Scientific American.