Network-Enabled Snooping In The Physical World

November 6, 2006 – 2:36 pm

We’ve got OCR. We’ve got cameraphones. We’ve got web-based license plate lookup services. Amazon Japan has a fancy cameraphone-based product search feature. What’s more naive, imagining that somewhere somebody has a SMS/MMS-based license plate snooping and facial recognition services and fingerprint scanners, or imagining that they don’t?
cameraphone, civil liberties, facial recognition, license plate recognition, mms, [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (0)



Living The Life Embarrassing, Stupid Online

April 23, 2006 – 5:49 pm

Without contradicting the moral weight of social software post from last week, let’s take a moment to look at three stories from Arstechnica about MySpace and others: online video leads to teen arrests, shooting rampage avoided due to MySpace posting, and Google + Facebook + alcohol = trouble.
These are the stories we’ve come to expect: [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (0)

Printer Fingerprinting

April 13, 2006 – 10:05 pm

News came out a while ago that many of our laser printers were embedding ?fingerprints? that allowed folks who knew how (like, say, the feds) to trace a printed page back to the day and time it was printed, and the serial number of the printer.
Or, at least that was the theory, until the EFF [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (0)

Facial Recognitition Spytech Goes Social

March 22, 2006 – 9:47 pm

Troy expressed both great amusement and trepidation in his message alerting me to Riya, a new photo sharing site:

I don’t know whether to say cool, or zool.

The tour explains that you upload photos, Riya identifies faces in your photos, then asks you to name them (or correct its guesses!). Then you get all your friends to join up and we can all search for everybody by people, location, and time. So say “hi” to Andrejs and Nora.

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Photoblog, Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (4)

The Future Of Privacy and Libraries

February 1, 2006 – 12:23 pm

Ryan Eby speaks with tongue firmly in cheek in this blog post, but his point is well taken. Privacy is serious to us, but we nonetheless make decisions that trade bits of our patrons’ privacy as an operational cost. While we argue about the appropriate time keep backups of our circulation records, we largely accept [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (0)