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...

Over at Computerworld, Ben Rothke makes the case for “Why Information Must Be Destroyed.”  “Given the vast amount of paper and digital media that amasses over time,” he argues, “effective information destruction policies and practices are now a necessary part of doing ...

And so begins another fight over data retention. As Declan summarizes: Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records...

Much like the Beacon incident before it, I have mixed feeling about this latest kerfuffle over Facebook’s changes to its privacy policy. On one hand, I just don’t see what the big deal is. People act like Facebook is taking away all their “rights” or possessions, which is jus...

So, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its revised “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising” today and it’s bound to generate a lot of commentary from those privacy advocates who seem to believe that we can never go far enough in regulating the flow of...

Just before the New Year, Mike Masnick reported: It’s been well over five years since we first heard about a plan in Oregon to attach GPS devices to cars and tax drivers based on how much they drove and the idea hasn’t become any better in the intervening years… but apparently i...

It’s been a big year for tech policy books. Several important titles were released in 2008 that offer interesting perspectives about the future of the Internet and the impact digital technologies are having on our lives, culture, and economy. Back in September, I compared some of the most popu...

Over the past year or so, many market-oriented critics of Google, like Scott Cleland and Richard Bennett, have criticized the company for aligning itself with Left-leaning causes and intellectuals. Lately, however, what I find interesting is how many leading leftist intellectuals and organizations h...

Remember being in grade school when a classmate’s rabble rousing would ruin it for everybody, and the teacher would hold back the class from going to recess? The other students would moan and groan and justifiably feel that punishing the entire class for one person’s misdeeds was unfair. This is...

I’ve just finished reading Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion , by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis, and it’s another title worth adding to your tech policy reading list. The authors survey a broad swath of tech policy territory — p...