Slides “Neue Medien – Fluch oder Segen”
The other day I visited Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) for a day to give a keynote speech and a workshop for FES stipends at the summer academy. (Full disclosure: paid gig.) For completeness’ sake I’m posting the slides below. In order for them to make sense I’d recommend downloading the file from Slideshare so you can see [...]
Google Collaboratory Report #1
It’s done! Over the course of the last few months I’ve been part of the German Google Collaboratory “Internet & Society”. The expert group is part of Google’s effort to reach out to multiple stakeholder groups and discuss with experts the challenges and opportunities our society faces. We discussed a whole range of topics from [...]
Google Streetview Germany: Worst of Both Worlds
So after seemingly endless debates, moving launch dates and massive protests by privacy groups and – worth noticing – Ilse Aigner, the minister of of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection, it looks like Google just pretty silently launched Streetview in Germany. Kind of. Kind of because it’s not the real Streetview, but a slightly different [...]
Diaspora, an open Facebook?
A few weeks ago, four recent NYU graduates announced – to the background noise of the latest (of many) major Facebook privacy fail – that they intended to build a privacy-focuses, decentralized, open-source alternative to Facebook. A social network, installed on a server of your choice, the data controlled by you alone. Their fundraising period [...]
Facebook turns against its users, pro marketers
The EFF has put together a timeline of Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy. And it’s a deeply disturbing thing to read. Please read the whole (brief) post over at the EFF website, but I’d like to highlight the development with just two quotes. From the 2005 Facebook privacy policy: No personal information that you submit to [...]
Google, Privacy, Germany
We’ve been discussing the unholy trinity of GPG – Google, Privacy, Germany – a lot recently. And by “we”, I mean in one swoop all the web scene, Germany and the media here as a whole, but also my friends and I. (One of those friends works at Google, so we can bounce ideas off [...]
CCC Freedom Stick, Olympics Special Edition
It’s been around for awhile, but CCC‘s Freedom Stick, a memory stick loaded with powerful privacy software, is now also available in an Olympics Special edition: CCC – China – Privacy Emergency Response Team, extra easy to use for non-technical users. It consists mainly of a TOR anonymizer plus mobile FireFox. Image: CCC Who’s it [...]
Protect your tweets – or don’t
Recently I proposed to add a little Twitter feature, namely an indicator for why you protect your Twitter feed. (Why is this important? To prevent social awkwardness.) Tapio picked up on this issue and asked (among others) me: You folks out there must have come across that situation: a new follower request comes in, you [...]
Twitter feature request: Protected updates options
One thing that’d be really useful for Twitter: If you could signal somehow why your Twitter updates are protected. Some folks do it because they prefer to communicate within their circle of friends. Others do it so they can monitor who subscribes to their tweets – which is the only way of making sure that [...]
Breaking the Banksy: First interview?
A new Banksy mural ‘One Nation Under CCTV’ painted next to a CCTV camera at a Post Office yard in the West End. (Image: Dailymail.co.uk) Half the world, it seems, has been chasing the British graffiti artist Banksy: Police for his vandalism, art collectors for his works, sprayers for his style, media for the scoop. [...]
