Category Archives: Surveillance
Ole, Intellectual Property, and Taxing Canadian ISPs
se companies. At best we might feel pity as we watch them wallow in their crisis. At worst, we fear what they might crush as they roll around on the ground like starving dinosaurs and demolish other elements of civil society in their throes of panic and fear aimed at extinguishing the generativity that endangers their ontological security. They’ve already made a real mess of copyright and cultural transmission possibilities; let’s hope they don’t damage the conditions of democratic communication itself as well. Continue reading
DoubleClick, Cookies, and Personal Information
In the course of this post, I begin by outlining what constitutes personal information and then proceed to outline DoubleClick’s method of collecting personal information. After providing these outlines, I argue that online advertising systems do collect personal information and that the definitions that Google offers for what constitutes ‘personal information’ are arguably out of line with Canadian sensibilities of what is ‘personal information’. As a result, I’ll conclude by asserting that violations may in fact be occurring, with the argument largely emerging from Nissembaum’s work on contextual integrity. Continue reading
Journal Publication: Moving Across the Internet
I recently had an article published through CTheory, one of the world’s leading journals of theory, technology, and culture. The article is titled “Moving Across the Internet: Code-Bodies, Code-Corpses, and Network Architecture.” The article emerged from a presentation I gave … Continue reading
Privacy Issues Strike Street View (Again)
Given that privacy law tends to be driven by actual instantiations of violation – not the possibility of a violation following the aggregation of data – it doesn’t appear that a clear violation occurs with the collection of the SSID and MAC address alone. Unencrypted data packets – including their payloads – might be another story. Continue reading
