Privacy icons similar to Creative Commons icons.
This is an idea that could be implemented very broadly for really any problems with consumers understanding their rights. It seems to me that companies would WANT to keep to some standards and communicate them to possible consumers. This kind of thing offers a way to do that. And imagine if similar iconograph systems could be used to show how much of your product was post-consumer, or what percentage of your profits go to charities, etc.
Project Glass: One day… (by Google).
Google’s commercials are always so good, because the technology seems to work so naturally with how people already live their lives. Like, this isn’t a commercial to persuade you to adopt a new way of life with a new technology, it’s to show you that the technology already anticipates how you live your life and will fit right in. It’s a real thing of beauty.
(THOUGH there is no ignoring the giant amount of privacy you give up when sharing ALL of this with google. But that’s just the normal complaint about Google.)
CV Dazzle: Open-Source Camouflage From Computer Vision by Adam Harvey. I absolutely love this idea.
Today in corporate denials: Carrier IQ edition - Boing Boing. Interestingly, neither AT&T nor Sprint deny that they use the service, but AT&T says they only use it for performance improvement. Sprint, then, uses it for… something else? Maybe it’s just a matter of lack of clarity, but Sprint looks pretty bad here.
World’s data will grow by factor of 50 in next decade - Digital Lifestyle - Macworld UK (via infoneer-pulse).
Our computers and our Google profiles and our internet histories will eventually know more about us than even our close family will be able to piece together from our communication with them.
Imagine that: if a computer wanted to simulate me, maybe create an artificial intelligence version of me, then extensive interviews with my friends and family would be less informative than a simple scan of my laptop and of the websites I frequent.
Saying that he’s been thinking about identity for 20 years, Schmidt calls it a “hard problem”: “The Internet would be better if we had an accurate notion that you were a real person”, he says.
A real person, Schmidt says, can be held accountable: “we could check them, we could give them things …bill them, you know, we could have credit cards and so forth … there are all sorts of reasons.”
“My general rule,” Schmidt said, “is that people have a lot of free time and … there are people who do really evil and wrong things on the Internet, and it would be useful if we had strong identity so we could weed them out.”
This doesn’t mean “eliminating them”, he says: “if we knew their identity was accurate, we could rank them. Think of them like an identity rank.”
This problem of authenticating yourself online is a really serious one. Identities are clearly established off-line, but there isn’t a solid proxy for establishing identity online. Historically, this has been accomplished by tying an offline thing (a credit card, most often) to your online identity. But using Google’s “identity service” to shore this up and provide a verifiable identity clearinghouse is an interesting idea.
Short, sweet, simple description of a pretty important (if relatively obvious) ruling.
Facebook Aims to Simplify Privacy Settings - NYTimes.com.
Oops! Facebook learned an important lesson from Google Plus!
Collecting DNA From Arrestees Is Unconstitutional, California Court Says.
I’m particularly interested in the fact that federal courts have indicated that this is probably constitutional, but state courts are certainly allowed to extend constitutional protections.
I guess I just find that interesting because it’d be hard to make the argument that this kind of DNA collection is a violation of civil liberties. California just happens to not like it. It’s a different version of this conversation than they one that we usually have.
London Police Use Flickr to Identify Looters - NYTimes.com.
How do we feel about this? Not too long ago, a video of a woman throwing a cat in a trash can hit the internet, and the public tracked down the woman. She was punished for her actions and we all felt good! But would we feel good if one of these people was punished for being photographed near some looting?
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