Category Archives: Privacy

Out-Law: Expert says ‘right to be forgotten’ could cause problems for publishers

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"Media law expert Kim Walker of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that the 'right to be forgotten' would have a major effect in relation to news archives. He said that there would be great difficulty in determining what stories are in the public interest and what are not, and that the importance of stories may change over time."

Joanna Geary: Privacy and social media investigation: how I tracked down an entire family from one tweet

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"It’s easy to say it’s incumbent on the individual to protect their own privacy, but it’s hard to see how we can always stop this type of jigsaw identification of people online. Sometimes people are mentioned online without them even knowing. Certainly having stricter default Facebook privacy settings would help, but it’s not the only answer."

Press Gazette: Tabloid editor: kiss and tells are not worth the effort

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"Press Gazette has seen unofficial industry estimates for the following NoW splash stories: "Crouch Beds £800 teen hooker" (8/8/10), "Cheating Roo beds hooker" (5/9/10), "Toon star's cocaine and sex orgy" (7/11/10), "Matt's a cheating sex addict (24/11/10) and "I bedded Roo's Man U team mate" (27/4/11). According to the estimates, "Cheating Roo beds hooker" - the story about Wayne Rooney cheating on his pregnant wife with a prostitute in a hotel room - was the only story to achieve a substantial week-on-week sales uplift. The other editions were either flat or slightly down week on week."

New York Times: Bits Blog: A Tool to Harvest Location Data

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Developers in The New York Times Company Research and Development Lab released a Web-based tool on Thursday that they hope will corral the location data Apple had been collecting and make it available to customers and researchers. ... People who participate in the project are asked to upload location information from their phone, which is then made anonymous and added to a database with the data from every other upload. "

O’Reilly Radar: Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves

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"Today at Where 2.0 Pete Warden and I will announce the discovery that your iPhone, and your 3G iPad, is regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file. ... All iPhones appear to log your location to a file called "consolidated.db." This contains latitude-longitude coordinates along with a timestamp. ... All iPhones appear to log your location to a file called "consolidated.db." This contains latitude-longitude coordinates along with a timestamp."

New York Times: Cellphones Track Your Every Move, and You May Not Even Know

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Story on the Zeit Online data retention interactive: “This is really the most compelling visualization in a public forum I have ever seen,” said [Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania], adding that it “shows how strong a picture even a fairly low-resolution location can give.”

Online Journalism Blog: Guest post: visualising mobile phone data – the data retention app

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"It’s not very often that one can follow the direct impact of an article, let alone a piece of data journalism. But the visualization of the cellphone data of Malte Spitz from the Green party in Germany led to visible repercussions in the US. Following a piece in the New York Times about Spitz and the data app, some days ago two senators wrote a letter to the 4 main US-carriers for information about their data retention policy."

Diaspora blog: Private Alpha Invites Going Out Today

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"Today we’re releasing the first set of invites for the Diaspora alpha at joindiaspora.com. Every week, we’ll invite more people, starting with our Kickstarter backers, and then moving through our mailing list. By taking these baby steps, we’ll be able to quickly identify performance problems and iterate on features as quickly as possible."

The Next Web: Proof That Location’s Gone Mainstream: The Celebrity Stalking App

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"Now [OK!] magazine’s publisher, Northern & Shell has released an iPhone app that is essentially a location-based guide to celebrity hangouts and misdemeanors. The app uses the iPhone’s location services to help you locate nearby celebrity haunts and find out which big names like to hang at them. ... Users can chat to staff writers via Twitter from the app and if they spot a celebrity, they can upload a geotagged image which may end up getting used in the magazine."