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    Category: Privacy

    • Hostile Information Architecture

      By Gordon Hull Surprise! Facebook is back in the news and the doghouse, this time for allowing vast amounts of user data to find its way to Cambridge Analytica, which then used it to try to elect Donald Trump.  The only surprise is that anyone is surprised.  I’ll review why that is first, then offer…

    • Limitless Home Surveillance by your Vacuum Cleaner

      By Gordon  Hull The expansion of the Internet of Things is going to provide a lot playspace for highly intensive and granular corporate surveillance – which is to say it’s going to be a catastrophe for privacy.  Sure, sure, everything will come with a “click here to accept” or comparable “notice and consent” privacy policy…

    • Today in Creepy Privacy Invasions: Burger King

      Apparently Burger King ran an ad that attempted to trigger Google Home by having a Burger King employee say “OK, Google: What is the Whopper burger?”  First the ad was up, then it was down, now BK says that it might come back.  The ad was supposed to trigger Google Home to read the first…

    • Squaring the Circle on Big Data, Class, Value and Primitive Accumulation

      A recent paper by Hamid Ekbia presents an interesting Marxian theory of the relation between exploitation and computer networks.   The paper is intended as an intervention in to discussions of the accumulation of value in what is now called cognitive capitalism (I’ve attempted to synthesize some of that literature here).  The most interesting part of…

    • SCOTUS on the Social Ontology of Hotels

      There were some interesting cases from the Supreme Court yesterday.  No, not gay marriage or Obamacare.  But the Court ruled in favor of business privacy (against blanket government intrusion) and in favor of a jail inmate who had been badly handled by deputies.  There’s also a potentially important regulatory takings case.  I want to look…

    • The Surveillance State at the Intersection of Bio, Juridical and Sovereign Power

      By Gordon Hull As I’ve suggested here before, one of the undertheorized aspects of biopower is the relation between biopower and the juridical power it supposedly supplants.  Now, I think it’s a mistake to think that biopower simply replaces juridical power, at least not on Foucault’s considered view (for the sorts of reasons given in…

    • Health Informatics, Negative Spaces, and Corporate Privacy

      by Gordon Hull Judge Richard Posner’s well-known application of law and economics to privacy yields results that appear, well, ideological.  First, he considers what individuals do with informational privacy. What is an interest in privacy of information, he asks?  Well, it’s an interest in enforcing an information asymmetry in markets.  Information asymmetry is presumptively bad…

    • Beyonce And The Singularity

      By: Samir Chopra A couple of decades ago, I strolled through Washington Square Park on a warm summer night, idly observing the usual hustle and bustle of students, tourists, drunks, buskers,  hustlers, stand-up comedians, and sadly, folks selling oregano instead of good-to-honest weed. As I did so, I noticed a young man, holding up flyers…

    • Cloud Computing and the Extension of the Price Mechanism

      by Gordon Hull Cloud computing – where users keep their data (and often their applications) online – poses significant theoretical and regulatory problems.  Many of these concern jurisdiction: it’s very hard to even know at a given moment where data is kept, and it’s often unclear (in the case of privacy, for example), which jurisdiction’s…

    • Privacy Research and Academic Freedom

      by Gordon Hull To the long list of rich entities trying to generate academic research that supports their business model, add (maybe) Google.  This piece in ProPublica discovered that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society had promised not to use any Google money to fund privacy research, after research done at Stanford led to…