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Showing posts with the label tracking

How and when is liking something informed consent ?

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I am just unaware of how consent has become either of these two options?   Which director at either of these businesses has (any) viability of what their companies have done.  I have explored here why optin/ optout needs to come back to the board and these both show great reasons why? How is liking something informed consent ? @sportaustralia How is no option - apart from agree - consent ? @ITV and when I follow the links what do I get - a right old mess.  Change the settings that then gets ignored when I come back to agree, I get the default everything and far far more than you get a better experience - surveillance and tracking goodies. If this not mis-leading I have no idea what qualifies for mis-leading. 

FOMO, tracking and habits

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I love my weekly email update from Nir Eyal and his post on Nir and Far - he writes on behaviour, habits and How to Build Habit-Forming Products.  He always brings up some interesting fact.   This week Nir was writing about the screen time problem, this is coupled with what Fred Wilson has been writing about on screen time trackers  made me think about my own FOMO with tracking. I used to have a fitbit, my phone and lots of devices to track me as I started on the ideas of quantified self  way back in 2008 - which feed into My Digital Footprint. I left "on" a wide range of trackers for location, heart, paces etc and tried to build a model.   Well I kind of got board and slowly the devices broke for a stack of reasons.  Rock Climbing and diving among the most obvious ones that some devices stopped functioning as well as they should.  Many have been upgraded and also gone to my overflowing man draw of one-day recycling for a project.  However, I now getti

Does data understand the meaning of a wink? #ds13

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My Presentation to Digital Shoreditch Does data understand the meaning of a wink? I believe that the problem we have with understanding data..... is the same fundamental problem, that we have about our views, our independent views, our independent views based on experience, our refined independent views based on on-going experience ; that we suffer when we talk about any political hot potato such as the economy, bank debt, personal credit, environmental change, global warming, privacy, size of government, policing or marriage reform……  we all have unique views and our views are different from the others around us and our views are also different again from our customers views – which apparently are the only ones that count! I contend that personal information, personal data, your data, your digital footprint and its relationship to you, your identity and your rights has the same complex mix, blends and balances that set and counter your personal views and insights.

Online Tracking: You’re Being Watched

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re-identification: the fatal flaw that means it is not quite as it seams

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The Re identification.pdf Download this file Daniel Barth-Jones has a critique of re-identification studies that informs the conversation about risks: In a recent Health Affairs blog article, he provided a critical re-examination of the famous re-identification of Massachusetts Governor William Weld’s health information. This famous re-identification attack was popularized by recently appointed FTC Senior Privacy Adviser, Paul Ohm, in his 2010 paper “Broken Promises of Privacy”. Ohm’s paper provides a gripping account of Latanya Sweeney’s famous re-identification of Weld’s health insurance data using a Cambridge, MA voter list. The Weld attack has been frequently cited echoing Ohm’s claim that computer scientists can purportedly identify individuals within de-identified data with “astonishing ease.” However, the voter list supposedly used to “re-identify” Weld contained only 54,000 residents and Cambridge demographics at the time of the re-identification attempt show that

Gary Kovacs @mozillagary from Mozilla: Tracking the trackers: TED talk

Extremely good TED talk… As you surf the Web, information is being collected about you. Web tracking is not 100% evil -- personal data can make your browsing more efficient; cookies can help your favourite websites stay in business. But, says Gary Kovacs, it's your right to know what data is being collected about you and how it affects your online life. He unveils a Firefox add-on to do just that.

How much data do you need to identify someone?

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  The level of identification can move from the simple to the complex, but where is the proof that the more complex is needed for all services?

Who's tracking/ collecting / passing / processing your data. A map of the display advertising world

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  source : http://www.adexchanger.com/

Facebook tracks what you do online, even when you're logged out - fixed but thanks for the detailed analysis

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Nik Cubrilovic,  Entrepreneur, hacker and writer original http://nikcub.appspot.com/logging-out-of-facebook-is-not-enough Whilst the Important Update say Facebook has responded and issued a fix for this issue. See the  follow up blog post "Facebook Fixes Logout Issue, Explains Cookies" I am very grateful that there are people about who go looking for this ....

GPS Tracking Is a "Search" - confusion over law and freedoms

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CDT joined in a  "friend of the court" brief   filed at the U.S. Supreme Court in what could be one of the major Fourth Amendment cases of the decade, U.S. v. Jones, which poses the question of whether the police can plant a GPS device on a person's car for 24/7 tracking without judicial oversight. The brief says: The issue before the Court in this case is not whether GPS tracking ever may be used by the government. Rather, it is whether the government must obtain a warrant in order to employ this technology. CDT's brief was filed jointly with our frequent partner in Fourth Amendment cases, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  Several things make the brief special.  First, it is also signed by four technologists, whose expertise lends special credibility to the brief.  Moreover, one of the four is Roger Easton, often called the father of GPS for his groundbreaking work at the Naval Research Laboratory.  The other three represent the current generation of experts

W3C Tracking Protection Working Group Charter - DRAFT; do comment

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Full document here  http://www.w3.org/2011/tracking-protection/charter-draft Scope The Working Group will produce Recommendation-track specifications for a simple machine-readable preference expression mechanism ("Do Not Track") and technologies for selectively allowing or blocking tracking elements. Proposed candidate technologies for this preference that the Working Group will consider include, but are not limited to, the use of an HTTP header to signal the preference and a site's response, and the use of a ECMAScript API or DOM property for the same purpose. Additionally, the Working Group will define the scope of that user preference and practices for compliance with it in a way that will inform and be informed by the technical specification. The group will actively engage governmental, industry, academic and advocacy organizations to seek global consensus definitions and codes of conduct. The Working Group may investigate monitoring of implementation and confor

Mobile Payment - types and tracking

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Good article by Alistair Fairweather titled Four Very Different Mobile Payment Services  - there is more on the article than here and worth a read This is his advantage and disadvantages and my added comments in colour Approach one: Phones as credit card machines (Square) Advantages Ubiquity and familiarity of credit cards (at least in developed economies); A clever and comfortingly familiar payment interface; and The focus on small businesses and vendors has given them cheap and effective market penetration. Disadvantages Requires physical proximity between buyer and seller; Requires a smart phone and special additional hardware (although it is free); and Requires the buy-in of (historically unfriendly) banks and credit card companies (which may slow or limit international adoption). All your lovely data is still not yours and make is easy for the status quo to remain, you can see some natural support from certain players who want to remain in power. Approach two: pho

Look into my eyes, I don't want to be tracked.....

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Image from:   The BBC reported this morning (18 th July 2011) on CatNav and CatCam (using tech to track your cat) The reporter Richard Westcote chatted to Roger Tabor  a Pet Behaviour Expert .  [need to ignore Roger used to present for the BBC and that his report is paid for by Bayer – who sell cat worming – which Roger managed to slip in several times, but the BBC forgot to say this was a paid ad ] However, there is a report here “ the secret lives of cats ” if you want to know what your cat gets up to, but that is not the point. Mary Whitehouse  (if you don’t know who she is – you really should) would have taken this up and said (me creating the words now) “ It is only a short step from tracking you pet to tracking you.  Once you believe it is safe and acceptable to do so, it will become easy for you to be hoodwinked into being tracked yourself.” It is all about small steps of education or erosion.  Is there any value in your Digital Footprint?

A Digital Footprint is about all your interactions with digital devices - Tom Tom sell their data on you.

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Pressure adds as companies come forward to reveal that they are selling your data - why is this a headline?.   My book is focussed on the topic of exchanging your data for valu  and the business models that are being used.  I have written over 60 blogs about selling your data in the barter for Free.  Whilst I love headlines; can we re-focus from shock to there is an exchange and what value is created! Article from the Register "TomTom sorry for giving customer driving data to cops" "Navigation device maker TomTom has apologized for supplying driving data collected from customers to police to use in catching speeding motorists.  According to the register tThe data, including historical speed, has been sold to local and regional governments in the Netherlands to help police set speed traps, Dutch newspaper AD  reported here , with a  Google translation here . As more smartphones offer GPS navigation service, TomTom has been forced to compensate for declining prof

Research paper: Did Anybody See That? Smartphone Tracking for Historical Data Retrieval

by Vikram P. Munishwa and Nael B. Abu-Ghazaleh ABSTRACT Smartphones have revolutionized the way in which sensing has been performed traditionally. The people-centric nature of smartphone-based sensing enables them to be a part of participatory or opportunistic sensing, where data is collected on a set of designated smartphones and delivered to a server. In this work, we identify the existence of another type of behavior, where the data is not delivered but archived locally on the phones for later retrieval. This type of behavior is common when the phone users capture some data (e.g. a video clip) out of their own interest. However, this complicates the future data retrievals due to the uncontrolled mobility of the data-capturing smartphones. Specially, the research challenges for later data retrieval include finding the current locations of the required subset of the mobile phones that were present in a specific region at a specific time, without compromising location and identity

Who is tracking my cookies?

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The AT&T Registry , powered by BlueKai, brings transparency to consumers by allowing them to see what preferences are being logged via the cookies on their computer. Furthermore, consumers can also control their anonymous profile by managing their topics of interest. Your preferences may be used anonymously to influence which types of marketing messages you receive across partner sites that we work with. Or you can choose to not participate at all via an  opt-out .

Are you being followed?

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Original article http://www.gizmag.com/die-zeit-interactive-tracking-mobile-phone/18295/ “While most of us know it is theoretically possible for our movements to be tracked by detecting which tower our mobile phone is connected too, it might come as a shock to see just how much of a digital footprint we leave as we go about our daily lives. German Green Party politician Malte Spitz and German newspaper  Die Zeit  have provided a frightening insight into just how much information can be gleaned from the digital breadcrumbs we drop every day by creating an  interactive map  showing Spitz's movements and activities over a five month period based on mobile phone data and information freely available on the internet.”

Do you want the right to be forgotten?

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Image : I had a flashback of something that never existed The interpretation of "Do you want the right to be forgotten?" in my mind is a war of words and misunderstandings.  On the top of one hill overlooking the battle field is a camp full of the privacy brigade who are awash with good use cases and top attention grabbing headlines. Pitched up on the other hill are the web 2.0 companies who want your data so they can offer a service for free; avoiding pay walls, annoying advertising and slow death.  In no-mans land are the regulators and the battle is being watched by us as aware, but not really caring participants, who have a live stream and a back channel for those who happen to want to voice an opinion on the current trending social media platform.  This is different topic  to the "do not track me" debate .   So what do we (I) actually want..... A right - "something that affords me some kind of protection"   The Wiki definition is better A

Do you want the right to be forgotten?

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Image : I had a flashback of something that never existed The interpretation of "Do you want the right to be forgotten?" in my mind is a war of words and misunderstandings.  On the top of one hill overlooking the battle field is a camp full of the privacy brigade who are awash with good use cases and top attention grabbing headlines. Pitched up on the other hill are the web 2.0 companies who want your data so they can offer a service for free; avoiding pay walls, annoying advertising and slow death.  In no-mans land are the regulators and the battle is being watched by us as aware, but not really caring participants, who have a live stream and a back channel for those who happen to want to voice an opinion on the current trending social media platform.  This is different topic  to the "do not track me" debate .   So what do we (I) actually want..... A right - "something that affords me some kind of protection"   The Wiki definition is better A

Your Digital Footprint Is Muddy - my response

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A blog post by Mitch Joel  " Your Digital Footprint Is Muddy"  outlines what happens when you say one thing in the physical world and do something on the back channel showing that you are really doing something else. The post and the comments go over some old ground and most companies have concluded that they want to recruit people who have a life and are professional.   Without a doubt one very small aspect of a digital (footprint) opens up the opportunity for detailed tracking and this in turn would enable anyone to exploit the differences between expressed behavioural and actual behaviours.  However, what make us human is the ability to change our minds as we learn, grow up and gain experience. In finance and investing we often see a phase that implies that past performance (behaviour) is not a good prediction of future performance (behaviour).   What will become interesting from digital footprint analysis in the future is that are we more predictable than we thi