From the article: “The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Monday finalized a landmark settlement with Google in which the company has agreed to be audited for its privacy practices for the next 20 years … The commission charged that Google engaged in unfair and deceptive practices in 2010 when it launched Google Buzz by leading users of its Gmail system to believe that they could easily opt-out of the social network. The controls that would enable them to do that were ineffective, the FTC charged at the time. Also the tools that Google created to enable users to limit the sharing of users’ personal information were confusing and difficult to find, the agency alleged.”
> From Ms. Zuckerberg: “I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away … People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.
> From the article: “A Google-funded institute in Berlin to study the internet’s impact on society is starting to take shape, with the US tech giant company announcing on Monday it would invest €4.5 million ($6.3 million) in the project.”
Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher recently interviewed Google CEO Eric Schmidt at D9. The whole thing is worth a watch, but two statements by Schmidt were truly exceptional. The first is his definition of privacy, the second is his framing of mobile tracking as “natural.”
Schmidt on privacy:
… from our perspective, privacy is a compromise between the interests of a government and the citizen.
Schmidt on (what I’m now calling) natural surveillance:
I’m very concerned, personally, about the union of mobile tracking and facial recognition. Because, mobile tracking is something that can occur naturally by virtue of these devices … biometrics, in general, will make it possible to do facial recognition in crowds.
I should have known it was mother nature, and not mankind, that created this form of surveillance … damn you nature!
In preparation for the 2011 Graduate Center-Humboldt University Summer Seminar that I’ll be participating in, I thought it would useful to take stock of some of the recent informational happenings in Germany:
Germany is now the largest market for video games in Europe, driven primarily by German interest in the Wii Fit (more …).
German laws banning the distribution of photos of people or their property without their permission is forcing Google to modify its StreetView functionality before its launch in Germany (more …).
A number of German states, led by Lower Saxony, are now trying to prevent web services such as Amazon, Facebook, or Google from aggregating and sharing visitor information without the explicit consent of the visitor (more …).
Facebook has grown by 260% in Germany over just the past year and Germany is now the 18th largest country in Facebook with over 2M members. However, Facebook still remains much smaller in Germany than the Berlin-based StudiVZ social network which boasts over 13M members (more …).
A Hamburg court has ruled that YouTube can be held liable for damages when it hosts copyright-protected material without permission (more …).
Dead Drops — an anonymous, offline, p2p file-sharing network in public space — has been established by Berlin based media artist Aram Bartholl. Dead Drops embeds USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs in public space, allowing anyone to plugin their laptop to share their favorite files and data (more …). h/t jgieseking
This is, but of course, a very small sample of recent happenings. Hopefully I’ll have more to report post-seminar.
GTD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and an affiliate faculty member of the New Media and Digital Design Program at Fordham University. He is also a founding coordinator of the Fordham Digital Scholarship Consortium and co-chair of the Mapping (In)Justice Symposium: Digital Theory and Praxis for Critical Scholarship. Donovan’s […]
– “Mapping (In)Justice Symposium: Digital Theory and Praxis for Critical Scholarship” – Symposium schedule (Nov 7-9, 2019), participant bios, and proceedings of the symposium. – “Databite No. 78: Remixing Modes of Knowing and Belonging in the Urban Platform” – Recording of April 2016 Databite Talk at Data & Society Research Institute. – “Making the Dissertation […]
