Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Reason.org has just posted my commentary on the five reasons why Federal Trade Commission’s proposals to regulate the collection and use of consumer information on the Web will do more harm than good. As I note, the digital economy runs on information. Any regulations that impede the collection and processing of any information will affect [...]
Do-Not-Track is not inconceivable itself. It’s like the word “inconceivable” in the movie The Princess Bride. I do not think it means what people think it means—how it is meant to work and how it is likely to offer poor results. Take Mike Swift’s reporting for MercuryNews.com on a study showing that online advertising companies [...]
Social widgets, such as the now-ubiquitous Facebook “Like” button and Twitter “Tweet” button, offer users a convenient way to share online content with their friends and followers. These widgets have recently come under scrutiny for their privacy implications. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook, Twitter, and Google are informed each time a user [...]
I spaced out and completely forget to post a link here to my latest Forbes column which came out over the weekend. It’s a look at back at last week’s hullabaloo over “Apple, The iPhone, and a Locational Privacy Techno-Panic.” In it, I argue: Some of the concerns raised about the retention of locational data [...]
Inspired by thoughtful pieces by Mike Masnick on Techdirt and L. Gordon Crovitz’s column yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, I wrote a perspective piece this morning for CNET regarding the European Commission’s recently proposed “right to be forgotten.” A Nov. 4th report promises new legislation next year “clarifying” this right under EU law, suggesting [...]
I participated last week in a Techdirt webinar titled, “What IT needs to know about Law.” (You can read Dennis Yang’s summary here, or follow his link to watch the full one-hour discussion. Free registration required.) The key message of The Laws of Disruption is that IT and other executives need to know a great [...]
At the FTC’s second Exploring Privacy roundtable at Berkeley in January, many of the complaints about online advertising centered on how difficult it was to control the settings for Adobe’s Flash player, which is used to display ads, videos and a wide variety on other graphic elements on most modern webpages, as well the potential [...]
By Eric Beach and Adam Marcus In the previous entry in the Privacy Solutions Series, we described how privacy-sensitive users can use proxy servers to anonymize their web browsing experience, noting that one anonymizer stood out above all others: Tor, a sophisticated anonymizer system developed by the Tor Project, a 501(c)(3) U.S. non-profit venture supported [...]
By Eric Beach & Adam Marcus Among Internet users, there are a variety of concerns about privacy, security and the ability to access content. Some of these concerns are quite serious, while others may be more debatable. Regardless, the goal of this ongoing series is to detail the tools available to users to implement their [...]
Remember, remember the Fifth of November, The Gunpowder Treason and Plot Privacy Dashboard, so hot, I know of no reason Why the Gunpowder Treason Privacy Dashboard Should ever be forgot. Sorry, I couldn’t resist, this being Guy Fawkes day (a major traditional holiday for Britons and, more recently, geeky American libertarians such as myself, who [...]
May 27, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
