Two major data brokers, a California elementary school and Google’s Gmail service are leading contenders for the Big Brother Awards — a dubious prize spotlighting organizations with egregious privacy practices.
Award recipients will receive a statue of a golden boot stomping on a human head.
The nominees were among those on a list made public Wednesday by Privacy International, the British watchdog group that runs the annual U.S. Big Brother Awards. The group plans to announce winners on April 14.
Category: Electronic Rights
Spend $2, Go to Jail
Steve Wozniak passes along a story about how some folks deal with the unfamiliar.
Homeland Insecurity: Rosenzweig Chairman of DHS Privacy Board
The Department of Homeland Security’s privacy board chose as its chairman Paul Rosenzweig, a conservative lawyer best known in technology circles for his defense of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness project. Bowing to privacy concerns, Congress pulled the plug on the program two years ago.
Nuala O’Connor Kelly, the department’s chief privacy officer, nominated Rosenzweig for the job during the group’s first meeting in a downtown hotel here. Rosenzweig is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former Justice Department trial attorney.
Armstrong’s Notes on MGM vs Grokster
I would say the argument went a little better for Grokster than I would have expected it to. Not to the point where I’d actually predict victory for them, but to my mind at least, the questions Grokster got were not as difficult as those MGM got.
The big issue that the Justices were wrestling with, it seemed to me, is what the standard ought to be for deciding whether services like Grokster can be secondarily liable for their users’ copyright infringement. The Justices did not sound especially satisfied with either MGM’s or the government’s answers to this question.
Big Brother, continued: Amazon Knows Who You Are & Will Sell the Data
Amazon.com has one potentially big advantage over its rival online retailers: It knows things about you that you may not know yourself.
Though plenty of companies have detailed systems for tracking customer habits, both critics and boosters say Amazon is the trailblazer, having collected information longer and used it more proactively. It even received a patent recently on technology aimed at tracking information about the people for whom its customers buy gifts.
Cuban Funding MGM vs. Grokster
Mark Cuban, in a lengthy post on the landmark MGM vs. Grokster case discloses his financial support for the EFF (our rights – vs. the Hollywood Rent Seekers).
Useful Background at www.outragedmoderates.org
What Price Trusted PC Security?
Because the trusted computing base is also used to make digital rights management systems more secure, this will give content providers a lot more control over what we can do with music, movies and books that we have bought from them.
Microsoft’s New Internet Ad Product: Selling Your Information
The new tool will allow advertisers to buy not just keywords but also the demographics of the person searching on those keywords.
MSN can do that most effectively when the search is conducted by a registered user who has already provided some personal details to the site. MSN attracts more than 380 million unique users worldwide per month.
This means that MSN, Hotmail and other Microsoft property users search & click data is aggregated, then sold to advertisers.
Better Bad News
Better Bad News summarizes the commentary around Google’s AutoLink (adlink) toolbar (which places google links on top of pages you view and phones your activity home). Quite funny and direct!
Beatallica: Milwaukee-based parody band & the music wars
On the NPR program “Day to Day” today, I report on Beatallica, the Milwaukee-based parody band known for Metallica-infused covers of Beatles songs. As reported previously here on Boing Boing, Sony Music accused them of violating copyright laws, demanded that their webmaster pay “unspecified damages,” and forced the band’s ISP to shut down their website.