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EBB is the ebiquity research group's blog at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). We focus on technologies that facilitate the design, implementation and control of distributed, intelligent information systems -- mobile and pervasive
Recent Posts Tagged With 'Privacy'
foaf:mbox_sha1sum considered harmful
The foaf:mbox property is very useful since it is ‘inverse functional’ and can thus serve as an ID for a foaf individual. This lets us infer that two foaf profiles with the same mbox refer to the same person. Since publishing your email ...
EU approves law requiring user consent for Web cookies
This ought to be fun. According to an article in the WSJ, Europe Approves New Cookie Law, “the Council of the European Union has approved new legislation that would require Web users to consent to Internet cookies..” The law could have b...
Can cloud computing be entirely trusted?
The Economist has been running a series of online Oxford Union style debates on topical issues — CEO pay, healthcare, climate change, etc. The latest one is on the cloud computing: This house believes that the cloud can’t be entirely trus...
Dashboard shows data Google has about you
Google added a great new service, Dashboard, that summarizes data stored for a Google account — see MY ACCOUNT>PERSONAL SETTINGS>DASHBOARD. “Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (...
Gaydar, Facebook and privacy
In the Fall of 2007, two MIT students carried out a class project exploring how presumably private data could be inferred from an online social networking system. Their experiment was to predict the sexual orientation of Facebook users who make thei...
Privacy concerns about new Netflix Prize data
The New York Times reports that the data for the Netflix Prize 2 will include more information about the anonymous users: “Netflix was so pleased with the results of its first contest that it announced a second one on Monday. The new contest w...
Project Gaydar and privacy in Facebook and other online social networking systems
Today’s Boston Globe has an article on online privacy provocatively titled Project ‘Gaydar’ that leads with a story of an class experiment done by two MIT students on predicting sexual orientation from social network information. “Us...
EFF whitepaper on location privacy
The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a whitepaper, On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever, discussing problems and solutions involving location privacy. The report, written by Andrew Blumberg and Peter Eckersley, outlines h...
Canada: facebook violates privacy law
APF and others report that Canada considers facebook’s practices to violate its privacy law. “Canadian officials on Thursday said Facebook was breaking national privacy law by holding on to personal information from closed accounts at th...
Tagged social networking site to be sued for privacy concerns
New York state attorney general Andrew Cuomo announced he intends to sue social networking company tagged.com “for deceptive e-mail marketing practices and invasion of privacy”. “Between April and June this year, Tagged sent tens of millio...
Changes in FaceBook default privacy policy
FaceBook is changing how it manages privacy starting today. After reading last week’s post on the FaceBook blog, More Ways to Share in the Publisher, and a followup note on ReadWriteWeb, A Closer Look at Facebook’s New Privacy Options, I ...
Privacy and the law
Privacy and the law The ABA Journal news blog has an post, Fordham Law Class Collects Personal Info About Scalia; Supreme Ct. Justice Is Steamed, on privacy and the law — or at least one very famous lawyer: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Sc...
Scantegrity cryptographic voting system to be used in binding governmental election
This November will be the first time any end-to-end cryptographic system will be used in a binding governmental election. UMBC Professor Alan Sherman and his students have been helping develop the Scantegrity open source election verification technol...
Facebook blinks, reverts to old Terms of Service agreement
Late last night Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a blog post, Update on Terms, that they have rolled back the recent changes to their Terms of Service agreement and restored the previous one. “Many of us at Facebook spent most of tod...
Facebook owns your content. All of it. Forever.
2/18 Update: FB reverted its TOS to the previous version early on 18 Feb 2009. Consumerist has a post on a change in Facebook’s Terms of Service agreement that became effective on 4 February: Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Ca...
Some Germans think Google knows too much
According to an article in Der Spiegel, Does Google Know Too Much?, many in Germany are concerned with Google’s broad range of information gathering. Google gathers so much detailed information about its users that one critic says some state ...
