Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Wednesday Is Data Privacy Day

January 28, 2009 is the second annual Data Privacy Day in the United States, Canada, and 27 European countries. Oracle has worked with other major companies to help found, sponsor and participate in Data Privacy Day activities in the United States.

Read more
to find out what you can do today to become more knowledgeable about privacy and to protect your own personal information.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Taking A Picture With an iPhone Leads to Unexpected Loss of Privacy

An interesting post from the blog of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada:

In the scenario described, the services used all have configurable settings about how much information to share to the public. Yet by mashing together a couple of services (iPhone & Flickr), some unanticipated consequences occurred. In this case, a reporter was able to track down a women he saw in a park simply because he observed her taking a picture with her iPhone.

For me, this shows the real challenge behind building technology that supports privacy. Society is still learning "the hard way" that when it comes to the Internet, you have to be very careful about your privacy. Even with configurable privacy settings, people may not realize the impact of linking services together.