Author Archives: Christopher
Online Voting and Hostile Deployment Environments
Elections Canada cannot secure an online electoral process, and that process is too important to risk to the Internet. Paper voting is annoying. It’s not necessarily as convenient as using a smartphone to move your money around. It takes time. It’s also one of the very few political expectations/hopes that are put on Canadians every few years. It is not too much to mail in a vote, go to a polling station, or (quite reasonably) abstain from voting for political, personal, or other reasons. It is too much to expect that we would endanger the entire electoral process just to attract those who are already unwilling to take a half-hour of their time every few years to cast a ballot. Continue reading
Review: Islands of Privacy
Ultimately, Nippert-Eng has provided a real contribution to the literature by making available years of empirical research and reaffirming conclusions that the literature has come to by way of theorization. In this way, Islands of Privacy offers strong empirical support for existing theoretical work, better grounding scholarly work and offering novel ways of articulating issues and problems that scholars have grappled with for decades. If you are invested in the sociological analysis of privacy and surveillance, or are looking for strong empirical grounding for some abstract theorizations of either, then this is a good book to add to your library. Continue reading
Weebly, Analytics, and Privacy Violations (Updated II)
Google demands that a very low baseline be met as a condition of using Analytics to surveil web visitors: they should be obliged to ensure that the baseline is met and, where it isn’t, apply consequences for violating Google’s terms of service. If the company can take a hard line on pseudonyms on their social networking service, why can’t they take a similar line concerning the use of the company’s older Analytics product? Continue reading
Letter to Stephen Harper on Lawful Access Legislation
Working from the most recent lawful access bills, which died when the last election was called, advocates and academics have come together to draft a letter of concerns to the Prime Ministers Office (PMO). Continue reading
