English fork of Heisse's "Social Share Privacy" anti Facebook and Twitter button software.

DuckDuckGo and Ixquick take a tiny bite out of Google.

The Metropolitan Police has implemented a system to extract mobile phone data from suspects held in custody.

Face recognition is good news for the police, but bad news for privacy lovers

How automated journalism and loss of reading privacy may hurt civil discourse.

Guardian's seven day series on threats facing the open internet. They are looking at censorship, militarization of the internet, walled gardens, IP, defamation, privacy and organizations working to keep the internet open.

From the sounds of it, Merrill and Calyx are going to be offering a wireless service piggybacking on the Clearwire network that uses end-to-end encryption and e-mail stored in encrypted form. Calyx appears to be stocked with people who certainly know what they're doing, ranging from former NSA technical director Brian Snow to the Tor Project's Jacob Appelbaum.

A new tool under development by Oregon State computer scientists could radically alter the way that communications work on the web. Privly is a sort of manifesto-in-code, a working argument for a more private, less permanent Internet.

The brilliant New York University philosopher Helen Nissenbaum has put her approach to privacy at the center of the national agenda.

Article on using RetroShare, the latest p2p (f2f - friend to friend) file-sharing network - also with social networking aspects.

on Concurring Opinions, a group law blog

available free online:

Part One. Locating the Networked Self
1. Imagining the Networked Information Society
2. From the Virtual to the Ordinary: Networked Space, Networked Bodies, and the Play of Everyday Practice

Part Two. Copyright and the Play of Culture
3. Copyright, Creativity, and Cultural Progress
4. Decentering Creativity

Part Three. Privacy and the Play of Subjectivity
5. Privacy, Autonomy, and Information
6. Reimagining Privacy

Part Four. Code, Control, and the Play of Material Practice
7. “Piracy,” “Security,” and Architectures of Control
8. Rethinking “Unauthorized Access”

Part Five. Human Flourishing in a Networked World
9. The Structural Conditions of Human Flourishing

10. Conclusion: Putting Cultural Environmentalism into Practice

Article about a meeting organized by Hypothes.is, a project on changing the structure around reputation-creation online. Runs into privacy issues in interesting ways; the founding meeting involved some of the Info Program's grantees and partners.

Patricia Poss, chief of the mobile technology unit at the F.T.C., suggested that to avoid regulation companies should build security into their products from the beginning of the process, not after a privacy debacle.

As Google engineers were building the system for passing facts like "your friend Suzy +1'ed this ad" from google.com to doubleclick.net, they would have likely realized that Safari was stopping them from linking this data using third-party DoubleClick cookies. So it appears they added special JavaScript code that tricked Safari into thinking the user was interacting with DoubleClick,2 causing Safari to allow the cookies that would facilitate social personalization (and perhaps, at some point, other forms of pseudonymous behavioral targeting). This was a small hole in Safari's privacy protections.

Unfortunately, that had the side effect of completely undoing all of Safari's protections against doubleclick.net. It caused Safari to allow other DoubleClick cookies, and especially the main "id" tracking cookie that Safari normally blocked. Like a balloon popped with a pinprick, all of Safari's protections against DoubleClick were gone.

the legislation does not consider the need to assess the privacy risks of the deployment of drones in US airspace.

The company is compiling user data across all of its products—at some point, it will be more than we're comfortable with.

The data protection authority said Google Apps did not comply with Norwegian privacy laws because there was insufficient information about where data was being kept. The decision came from a test case in Narvik, where the local council had chosen to use Google Apps for their email.

Google will watch how users behave across all its websites and merge the information into a single profile under sweeping changes to its privacy policy.

Could have implications for mobile phones as well -- from the article: "An overlapping array of justices were divided on the rationale for the decision, with the majority saying the problem was the placement of the device on private property.

But five justices also discussed their discomfort with the government’s use of or access to various modern technologies, including video surveillance in public places, automatic toll collection systems on highways, devices that allow motorists to signal for roadside assistance, location data from cellphone towers and records kept by online merchants."

A huge identity scheme promises to help India’s poor—and to serve as a model for other countries. But parliamentarians and activists have raised worries over India’s lack of strong privacy and data-protection laws; they also complain about the weak legal basis for the scheme.

The purpose of the 2012 Episteme conference is to take some first steps towards establishing ‘the epistemology of privacy’ as an important new area of epistemological investigation. In particular, this conference aims to elucidate the role knowledge plays in the privacy debate. Furthermore, given the relation between privacy and secrecy, this conference also aims to investigate the notion of secrecy as an epistemological notion.

Place: NH Hotel The Hague, the Netherlands
Date: June 8-10 2012

(Financial Times) -- Businesses breaching European Union privacy rules will face fines of up to 5 per cent of their global turnover under sweeping proposals to be unveiled next month.

One of the requirements of the proposed legislation is that the records remain within Australia. “The rationale [for the data location provisions] is not the security of data or the privacy of consumers,” the submission states. As a result, it says, the requirement that the PCEHRs be controlled by a “local operator” and that records must not be taken outside of Australia are a “structural weakness” in the system.

Microsoft also darkly threatens trade obligations, saying that the localization requirements “could be interpreted as Australia taking a step away from its commitment to being an open trading nation”, since the provisions “could be viewed as non-tariff barriers to commercial engagement”.

danah boyd, Chris Soghoian, Jeff Jarvis debate privacy

A recent report by Carnegie Mellon University finds that internet privacy tools designed to protect consumers from online behavioral advertising are ineffective because they are difficult for users to understand and to configure.