Tag Archives: Privacy

The Stasi is a good point. The Stasi is what happens when a state tries to achieve total watchfullness. — Nic Ferrier (@nicferrier) January 18, 2015

I’ve written a couple of times about the New York City Taxi Commission’s metadata and how easily it can be abused even though it was anonymized by removing the personally identifiable information. The anonymization notwithstanding, data analysts were able to … Continue reading →

Remember that NYC Taxi Commission data set that was used to identify strip club patrons and the comings and going of celebrities? Another data analyst has shown how it can be used to identify Muslim cab drivers. There’s nothing wrong … Continue reading →

Nic Ferrier has a few words of his own on government snooping. This time from a British point of view. We appear to be sleep walking into a world where MI5 can constantly watch us. If you don't think this … Continue reading →

An internal CIA board has found that its officers had done nothing wrong by breaking into the computers of senate staffers who were investigating claims of CIA torture. If you’re surprised by this you haven’t been paying attention. The government … Continue reading →

Remember how I told you not to trust government promises about data collection? That, according to the iron law of data collection, the data will always be used for other purposes even if the government promises otherwise? Not that you … Continue reading →

Richard Posner is a 7th Circuit Federal Judge. He’s always struck me as the ideal jurist. Informed not only on the law but in many other areas, especially economics. More than a Judge, he’s an intellectual and perhaps even a … Continue reading →

Britain calls forth the four horsemen and apparently without shame or self awareness.

Over at Neustar Research, Anthony Tockar has an interesting if terrifying post on the analysis of anonymized data from New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. The data, which was obtained through a FOIA request, contains details of every Taxi … Continue reading →