Google's new "Interest Based Advertising" (IBA) program represents the company's first foray into what is generally called "Online Behavioral Advertising" (OBA): In order to deliver more relevant advertising, Google will begin tailoring ads delivered through AdSense on the Google Content Network (GC...

Google has long claimed that its motto is "Don't be evil". But with its latest development, I can't help feeling that it's sliding quickly down a very slippery slope. That's because Google now allows advertisers to target their ads according to visitors' web histories, or what it calls "interest-bas...

[Dave Birch] One of my most frequent criticisms of the UK's national identity card scheme is that it is backward-looking, an electronic simulation of a Victorian ID card rather than an ID card for the 21st century. I gave an example of this in a talk recently by using the case of OpenID, noting that...

The geniuses at Google, the world's most arrogantly clever ad sellers, have announced plans to target ads to Internet users based on their "interests." You can opt out — but there's a catch. Susan Wojcicki, the Google vice president who's also the sister-in-law of cofounder Sergey Brin, announ...

If you devote a sizable chunk of your time to writing about surveillance, you see grim predictions about "the end of privacy" bandied about with a numbing regularity—hell, I've got at least two books by that title on my shelf right now. Which may be why it took me a while to get around to Yale...

When we tallied up the results from our 2009 reader poll, I promised to invite more ongoing conversation by pointing out some of the interesting comment threads that are popping up in articles long after the original publication date. There's a large amount of untapped insight and perspective in som...

Als Osama er in geslaagd was nog één stevige aanslag in de VS te plegen ergens begin 2002, dan waren de Verenigde Staten echt hun vrijheid en grondwet kwijt geraakt. Op deze en veel andere plekken is regelmatige afgegeven op het beleid van Bush in reactie op het terrorisme. Bush bashen kreeg het a...

Filed under: Computers Facebook offers members opportunities to not only remain in contact with distant friends and meet new people with common interests, but to also voice their opinions and describe in great detail the minutiae of their daily lives. For some reason, though, people can't seem to gr...

By Adam Thierer, Berin Szoka, & Adam Marcus As noted in the first installment of our "Privacy Solution Series," we are outlining various user-empowerment or user "self-help" tools that allow Internet users to better protect their privacy online-and especially to defeat tracking for online behavi...

By Adam Thierer, Berin Szoka, & Adam Marcus As noted in the first installment of our “Privacy Solution Series,” we are outlining various user-empowerment or user “self-help” tools that allow Internet users to better protect their privacy online-and especially to defeat tr...