Posted August 25th, 2009
Anyone else not surprised by recently findings from this internal report form the London policy force? The net of it is closed circuit television (CCTV) camera do little to solve crimes. It seems that the success rate is 1,000 cameras per solved crime. Just a few million more cameras and we’ve got the crime thing licked, eh?
Questions that I’d like to see answered are:
- How many crimes were not committed because of the presence of a CCTV camera?
- How many crimes were committed in a different location because of the presence of a CCTV camera?
The first question is impossible to answer. The second can be answered and a UC Berkeley study of the city San Francisco’s CCTV camera efficacy has been released. You can ready about the results here and here. The San Francisco study shows the cameras move crime from areas near cameras to areas away from cameras – no big surprise there.
As I have mentioned previously on Tuesdaynight, trading the feeling of safety (without an actual increase in safety) for an invasive, always-on, 3rd-party-accessible video monitoring presence is a choice that leads to a far more paranoid society, less willing to engage in social behavior and less like the kinds of societies in which we want to participate.
Posted July 27th, 2009
Over the last two weeks, I have been using my homegrown Facebook application, Privacy Mirror, as a means of experimenting with Facebook’s privacy settings. Although Facebook provides a nice interface to view your profile through your friends’ eyes, it does not do the same for applications. I built Privacy Mirror with the hopes of learning what 3rd party application developers can see of my profile by way of my friends’ use of applications. I have yet to speak with representatives of Facebook to confirm my findings, but I am confident in the following findings.
Imagine that Alice and Bob are friends in Facebook. Alice decides to add a new application, called App X, to her profile in Facebook. (For clarity’s sake, by “add”, I mean that she authorizes the application to see her profile. Examples of Facebook applications include Polls, Friend Wheel, Movies, etc.) At this point, App X can see information in Alice’s profile. App X can also see that Alice is friends with Bob; in fact, App X can see information in Bob’s profile. Bob can limit how much information about him is available to applications that his friends add to their profiles through the Application Privacy settings. In this case, let’s imaging that Bob has only allowed 3rd party applications to see his profile picture and profile status. Continue reading "Looking beyond the Privacy Mirror"...
Posted July 25th, 2009
I find that I rely on my debugging skills in almost every aspect of my life: cooking, writing, martial arts, photography… And it helps when you’ve got friends who a good debuggers as well. In this case, my friends lent a hand helping me figure out what I was seeing in my Privacy Mirror.
The following is a snapshot of the Application Privacy settings I have set in Facebook:
Given these settings, I would expect that the Facebook APIs would report the following to a 3rd party application developer: Continue reading "Further findings from the Privacy Mirror experiment"...
- My name
- My networks
- My friends ids
- My profile status
Posted July 22nd, 2009
As I previously blogged, I read Canada’s Assistant Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham’s findings on Facebook and it got me thinking about 3rd party applications. I wondered what 3rd party app developers could see in my profile. In my estimation, the easiest way to find out what a 3rd party application developer could see, was to become a 3rd party application developer.
Enter Privacy Mirror
I built a basic Facebook application called Privacy Mirror. The goal of Privacy Mirror was to see, as a 3rd party developer, just what information I could glean from my profile via Facebook’s APIs. At first, I used two Facebook API calls:
I wanted to call these APIs, see what data they returned, and that’s that. I had and have no interest in storing any of the data, and, in fact, Facebook deems most of the data I retrieved as unstorable according to their terms and conditions. For those of you who use Privacy Mirror I want to repeat, I do not store any of the information that is retrieved by the API calls. Continue reading "Privacy Mirror: A privacy experiment in Facebook"...
Posted July 21st, 2009
No doubt you frequent fliers out there have received emails from your airline of choice talking about TSA’s Secure Flight. As you make air travel reservations in the future, your airline will communicate with TSA to get, essentially, a fly/no-fly decision from the Secure Flight system. As the TSA explains in the “How it works” section of their website dedicated to Secure Flight:
Secure Flight matches the name, date of birth and gender information for each passenger against government watch lists to:
- Identify known and suspected terrorists
- Prevent individuals on the No Fly List from boarding an aircraft
- Identify individuals on the Selectee List for enhanced screening
- Facilitate passenger air travel
- Protect individuals’ privacy
After matching passenger information against government watch lists, Secure Flight transmits the matching results back to aircraft operators.
Did you notice the extreme use of irony there? Secure Flight is used to “facilitate passenger air travel” and yet Secure Flight’s sole purpose is to keep people off of planes. (I think someone at the TSA doesn’t know what facilitate means.) Irony aside, Secure Flight is ignorant of (or at least tone-deaf to) the US’ strong social and legal tradition of freedom of movement. Secure Flight can act as a preemptive refusal of air travel in the absence of due process, which contravenes citizens’ freedom of movement. Continue reading "Laplace’s Demon, Santa Claus and TSA’s Secure Flight"...
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lawyer bait I work for The Burton Group, but the postings on this blog reflect only my personal views; they do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of The Burton Group or its management.
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