privacy

Newer Roomba vacuums form a map of your house to more efficiently clean areas. The company plans to sell the data, per Rhett Jones for Gizmodo: The Roomba is generally…

As you probably know, Twitter (and all social media) collects data about you and infers your likes, dislikes, wants, dreams, hopes, etc. Sam Lavigne set up a scraper to find…

We live in a time when personal data leaves digital traces of what we do, what we like, and who we care about. Quinn Norton makes a concerted effort to…

Facebook logs data about you and how you use their application. I know this. You know this. From there, Facebook makes inferences and serves you ads that might be relevant.…

Maciej Ceglowski, the creator of bookmarking site Pinboard, spoke at the Library of Congress a couple of weeks ago about deep-fried data. In our case, the deep-fryer is a toolbox…

The general public kind of knows about data privacy issues. But not really. Or they know, and they’re willing to trade for the ability to share things easily on social…

Peter Aldhous and Charles Seife dug into flight path data, specifically looking for flights manned by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The government’s airborne surveillance has received…

Metadata can tell you a lot, and most of us agree that it’s not “just metadata” at this point. The Share Lab shows what one can find, just using everyday…

Data researcher and artist Mimi Onuoha looked at the personal location and messaging data from four groups of people in a project called Pathways. It’s less about how much we…

Sensible Data by Martin Hertig is an installation that asks what personal data is worth to you. Using a photo of you and an email, it gives you a self-portrait…

Just because there's no content that comes with the metadata doesn't make the latter useless.

You typically hear about data breaches in terms of number of records that were hacked. “A million email addresses were stolen” or “hackers ripped off 100,000 passwords.” Does anyone care?…

Technology continues to advance quickly, but the social questions are lagging a bit. Radiolab explores the topic of we-can-but-should-we from the perspective of a surveillance system that watches an entire…

The Citizen Ex browser extension guesses where you’re geographically located on the web. That is, it guesses where the server — the one you just pulled that website from —…

With wearables and cheaper and advancing tech, the how part of personal data collection is fairly straightforward. So now we move into the more socially complex questions around privacy, money,…

Did you watch the latest Last Week Tonight with John Oliver yet? You should. It’s on government surveillance, presented in a way that’s relevant and entertaining for all.…

Sisi Wei and Charles Ornstein for ProPublica highlight reported data breaches to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that affected at least 500 people, since October 2009. Of…

In her 2012 piece Stranger Visions, Heather Dewey-Hagborg used DNA found in public left in chewed gum, cigarette butts, and hair to construct estimated face busts.…

Think big data, and it’s tough not to associate it with big corporations who have their own interests in mind. Use data. Make money. It doesn’t have to always be…

You make and publish bits of data about yourself, intentionally and unintentionally, and it goes to the indexed public web or to companies’ private black boxes. Ben Goldacre explains why…

When you have your phone’s Wi-Fi turned on, even if you’re not connected to anything, you broadcast the networks you’ve connected to, which in turn can reveal your location history.…

Jaap de Maat, a graduate student at the Royal College of Art, rigged a filing cabinet to follow people around for his final project. It reminds people of the data…

Carter Jernigan and Behram F.T. Mistree found that sexual orientation of an individual is strongly correlated to the sexual orientation of the individual’s friends on Facebook.…

It’s just metadata. What can you do with that? Kieran Healy, a sociology professor at Duke University, shows what you can do, with just some basic social network analysis. Using…

The Onion tackles data privacy: “As a law-abiding resident of this nation, I have the right to do whatever I want without a shadowy organization recording my every move, unless…

With all the stuff going on with surveillance and data privacy — especially the past week — it’s worthwhile to revisit this essay by Daniel J. Solove, a professor of…

NYU ITP graduate student Federico Zannier collected data about himself — online browsing, location, and keystrokes — for his thesis. As he dug into personal data more and looked closer…

Facebook logs and saves a lot of data about you and what you do on their site. This shouldn’t be surprising given the more time people spend on Facebook, the…

Not many people understand the importance of data privacy. They don’t get out how little bits of information sent from your phone every now and then can show a lot…