November 3, 2013 |
Chris Taylor |
Derrick Harris wrote up a great piece for GigaOm today, Pondering Privacy, Part 2: Let’s get over ourselves already. In his article, he argues the following: While the work privacy advocates do to highlight the tactics and implications of online data collection is commendable, it’s a little misleading. No, it’s not ideal that companies and […]
October 29, 2013 |
Jeanne Roué-Taylor |
Snowden’s stories of a far-reaching NSA shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone working with Big Data. We’re entering a new age and the technology and techniques of the past won’t hold up. Just reading the headlines is all the evidence we need. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone was being monitored by […]
October 8, 2013 |
Jeanne Roué-Taylor |
The Web and Big Data are making the world a much smaller place. Uncomfortably small in some cases. As reported in the NY Times, many sites have sprung up across the Internet that post mugshots online in what could be best described as extortion…they’ll take them down for a fee. What truly makes it extortion […]
October 1, 2013 |
Chris Taylor |
The following is a guest post by Alistair Croll. I posted this on Facebook but it belongs here instead. There’s a meme running around that somehow the iPhone fingerprint scanner uploads your biometrics to Apple’s servers. The way these things work is that your fingerprint is turned into a series of numbers, usually through a one-way mathematical […]
September 5, 2013 |
Chris Taylor |
The following is a guest post by Alistair Croll. A couple of years ago, I spoke with an European Union diplomat who shall remain nameless about the governing body’s attitude to privacy. “Do you know why the French hate traffic cameras?” he asked me. “It’s because it makes it hard for them to cheat on their […]
September 4, 2013 |
Chris Taylor |
Kashmir Hill’s piece in Forbes, The Terrifying Search Engine That Finds Internet-Connected Cameras, Traffic Lights, Medical Devices, Baby Monitors and Power Plants, reports on a search engine, Shodan, built for the purpose of crawling for devices on the Internet, many of which are programmed to answer and are sometimes easy to hack. Among the devices […]
August 11, 2013 |
Jeanne Roué-Taylor |
Technology makes it easier than ever to spy on citizens, as we saw with the NSA’s Prism and other (…domestic) surveillance programs. By extension, technology also makes it easier to spy on just about anyone we have some control over, including employees and our loved ones, especially our children. Last week, we received an ad […]
August 10, 2013 |
Jeanne Roué-Taylor |
The following is a guest post by Catheryne Nicholson. If you’re an educator or a developer building and using cool technology to help teachers, children and parents, I’d like to give you a Momma Bear’s piece of advice: if you collect or store information about my kids, secure it. The minute you start gathering data about […]
August 9, 2013 |
Jeanne Roué-Taylor |
If you live in California and had your phone turned on one evening last week, you were probably startled to get a text from the statewide system that alerts residents to emergencies. Boulevard, CA AMBER Alert UPDATE: LIC/6WCU986 (CA) Blue Nissan Versa 4 door While it was startling for many, what it showed us was […]
July 30, 2013 |
Chris Taylor |
It’s getting harder and harder to get away with things, even in the biggest crowds…and especially in the biggest crowds. The London riots last year were captured in incredible detail by not just London’s ubiquitous street cameras, but by thousands of people in the streets, both good and bad, on smartphones. You’d think that people […]
July 23, 2013 |
Chris Taylor |
The following is a guest post by Alistair Croll. Recently, I wrote a post about big data and civil rights, which seems to have hit a nerve. It was posted on Solve for Interesting and on Radar, and then folks like Boing Boing picked it up. I haven’t had this kind of response to a post before (well, I’ve had […]
June 24, 2013 |
Chris Taylor |
Thank you, Edward Snowden, for making my job easier. I’m withholding judgement on whether you made the world a safer or better place, but you’ve certainly awakened it to the concept of Big Data. I’ve spent the better part of the past few years involved in Big Data projects and writing about its power and […]
June 9, 2013 |
Theo Priestley |
As the NSA PRISM debacle continues to unfold and spreads across continents it’s probably good to stop and think about the technology and philosophy behind it all. Because this is big data and analytics in its most potent and controversial form and it’s certainly not the last time we’ll see this hit the headlines. The […]
June 9, 2013 |
Jeanne Roué-Taylor |
The brouhaha over NSA’s PRISM project that involved spying on Verizon customers and asking Silicon Valley giants for access to their customer records is a bit of false indignation, if you ask me (what, you didn’t ask me?). First, there have been warnings for years about our loss of privacy. Secondly, and may more importantly, […]
June 8, 2013 |
Chris Taylor |
Most people working in technology are in some way part of the vast conversation taking place around Big Data. That has to be hundreds of thousands if not millions of individuals. “Powerful insights” is the commonly heard phrase. It should also be completely clear to the public by now that data in large enough sets, […]
June 2, 2013 |
Chris Taylor |
Is there nowhere left to hide, even for the rich? Andorra announced that they’ll begin phasing in taxes to comply with European regulators looking to prevent tax cheats from hiding their money in this tiny mountain-locked country in the Pyrenees between France and Spain. Secrecy is a common reason to open bank accounts in places […]