Category: Privacy

On Detecting Assistive Technology

March 1, 2014

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Topics: Accessibility, Privacy.

It’s what everybody’s talking about, so why not chime in? Karl Groves Marco Zehe Dylan Barrell Dennis Lembree And spawned by the results from WebAIM’s 5th Screen Reader User Survey. First off: the original question was whether screen reader detection should be allowed, and not about detecting all assistive technology – and there’s a good reason for that. The relationship between screen readers and browsers is much closer than, say, the relationship between an adaptive keyboard and a browser. The […]

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Investigations into Google Privacy

January 24, 2007

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Topics: Google, Privacy.

Google Privacy is not a fancy new Google service. (Nice idea – personalized privacy management of your Google Account – I like it.) Nonetheless, doesn’t exist. The privacy of your information at Google is the subject of an investigation by the Norwegian Data inspectorate, along with privacy concerns at several other Norwegian search engines. This organization is attempting to answer a few specific questions, according to Pandia.com: Well…maybe specific isn’t quite the right word, actually. The quote from the Pandia […]

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AOL’s Big Blunder

August 7, 2006

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Topics: Privacy.

Although the idea of releasing an extensive quantity of unique search data for research purposes is admirable, the privacy issues raised by AOL (America Online)’s unwary release are pretty disconcerting. As has become pretty widely known, AOL released search logs containing the searches of 658,000 users conducted over the course of three months. A fabulous resource for researchers investigating user habits and search marketing; but also an extremely invasive database of personally identifiable search paths and other personal data. AOL […]

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Google DID Compromise their Principles

June 7, 2006

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Topics: Google, Privacy.

I’ve written several times before on Google’s situation in China, and have generally been supportive of their decision to move into China, despite the limitations posed on them by the Chinese government. I believe that censorship is a terrible thing; and I can’t support that particular activity – but it’s still unclear to me whether there was any reasonable business justification to ignoring the Chinese market. Is it a greater censorship to withhold Google’s index entirely, or to provide a […]

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Google’s battle against the forces of Evil

March 19, 2006

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Topics: Google, Privacy.

The resolution of Google’s well-publicized dispute with the United States Department of Justice is now well-known – and Google won. At least, mostly won. Google’s official blog post on the matter states very clearly that they were successful – "Judge tells DoJ "No" on search queries". Google has been spared the need to provide millions of search queries to the government. However, they have not been spared entirely. They will still be required to supply 50,000 URLs from their index […]

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