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On this week’s John Stossel show on Fox Business Network, I debated Internet privacy, advertising, and data collection issues with Michael Fertik of Reputation.com. In the few minutes we had for the segment, I tried to reiterate a couple of keep points that we’ve hammered repeatedly here in the past: There’s no free lunch. All [...]

September 8 — this Tuesday — is the deadline for filing objections against the Google Book Settlement. A number of trade associations, corporations, authors, and advocacy groups have weighed in, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union. They argue that approving the Google Book Settlement in its current form, without explicitly [...]

Jeff Jonas has published an important post: “Your Movements Speak for Themselves: Space-Time Travel Data is Analytic Super-Food!” More than you probably realize, your mobile device is a digital sensor, creating records of your whereabouts and movements: Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day. Every call, text [...]

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz warned yesterday that companies involved in Web advertising face their “last chance” to “voluntarily” adopt stricter policies governing the use and collection of consumer information, Reuters reports. This isn’t the first time the FTC has threatened the advertising industry with regulation, but it signals a sense of immediacy that may pressure [...]

I’ve been quite depressed to witness Bruce Schneier’s ongoing conversion from opponent of government intervention in the high-tech economy (at least on encryption) to vociferous proponent (at least in terms of privacy regulation).  Anyway, his latest cheerleading piece for government privacy regulation in The Wall Street Journal includes lots of fear-mongering about private website data [...]