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2011 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture
The Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program is proud to be a co-sponsor of the 2011 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture.
Really? Half of Young People Not That Upset By Hacking Of Their Facebook and E-mail Accounts
By Kashimir Hill| Forbes.com| Oct 12, 2011| There’s constant debate over whether young people today care less about privacy. Certainly, they live more public lives, thanks to growing up on the Internet where starting a Facebook account is the equivalent of hitting digital puberty. Being out in the world in new ways increases the types of privacy violations that can occur for these “digital natives.” Last week, I mentioned briefly a poll from MTV and the Associated Press that found that a third of young people aged 14-24 reported that someone had logged into their Facebook, Twitter, or email account to impersonate them or spy on them. That may be shocking in and of itself, but what’s more surprising to me is that a good number of them said this didn’t upset them…
A Blogger at Arab Spring’s Genesis
By Kristen McTighe| New York Times| Oct 13, 2011| Ms. Ben Mhenni is an example of how protesters helped break a regime’s stranglehold on the media and accelerate a revolution that brought down the 23-year dictatorship of Mr. Ben Ali and that went on to ignite much of the Arab world. It was a revolution that, in the case of Ms. Ben Mhenni, began even before the Arab Spring
Social media users lose privacy rights
By Cheryl Hall | Dallas Morning News|Sept 7, 2011| Millions of Americans are blithely bounding into social network sites. They think that by setting strict parameters for who can be their friends and see their postings on Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn, they've shielded their personal stuff from unwanted eyes. Those are naïve and dangerous assumptions, says Peter Vogel, an Internet legal specialist. Your privacy rights are tossed out as soon as you click "yes" to join a social site.
Political Repression 2.0
By Evgeny Morozov| New York Times |Sept 1, 2011| Amid the cheerleading over recent events in the Middle East, it’s easy to forget the more repressive uses of technology. In addition to the rosy narrative celebrating how Facebook and Twitter have enabled freedom movements around the world, we need to confront a more sinister tale: how greedy companies, fostered by Western governments for domestic surveillance needs, have helped suppress them. Libya is only the latest place where Western surveillance technology has turned up. Human rights activists arrested and later released in Bahrain report being presented with transcripts of their own text messages — a capacity their government acquired through equipment from Siemens, the German industrial giant, and maintained by Nokia Siemens Networks, based in Finland, and Trovicor, another German company. And it’s not just off-the-shelf technology; some Western companies supply dictators with customized solutions to block offensive Web sites. A March report by OpenNet Initiative, an academic group that monitors Internet censorship, revealed that Netsweeper, based in Canada, together with the American companies Websense and McAfee (now owned by Intel), have developed programs to meet most of the censorship needs of governments in the Middle East and North Africa — in Websense’s case, despite promises not to supply its technology to repressive governments.
Arab Spring– and the Long Winter Ahead
By Alison Craiglow Hockenberry| Huffington Post |August 16, 2011| For all the debate about whether this is the year of the Twitter revolution and the Facebook riots, the much more interesting question is: What is not happening on the giant social media websites of the world?
Hacker Traces Laptop Thief Using Facebook Information
By Erica Swallow| BBC |August 17, 2011| If you’re going to steal a laptop, make sure you know who you’re dealing with — one London teenager accused of stealing a laptop during the recent London riots certainly didn’t do his homework on who he was robbing.
Internet Firms Must Help Police Online Tracking
|San Jose Mercury News| July 26, 2011 | Privacy groups and some members of Congress are up in arms, and rightfully so, over a new study revealing that many online advertising companies continue to follow people's Web activity, even after users believe they have opted out of tracking.
Advocates push to protect elderly, poor from Web fraud
By Rachel Roubein | USA Today | July 27, 2011 | Consumer and privacy advocates on Tuesday pushed for greater online protections and education for seniors as well as low-income and disadvantaged users who increasingly are embracing the Internet.
Tech IPOs Grapple with Privacy
By Cecilia Kang| Washington Post: Post Tech | June 18, 2011 | For social media start-ups, going public these days involves more than sprucing up business and financial models. Also showing up in the blogs and securities filings of companies such as Groupon, LinkedIn, Pandora and Zynga is a new consideration: privacy.
Telex Promises Path Around State-Sponsored Net Censorship
By Thomas Claburn | InformationWeek | July 18, 2011 | A team of computer researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada and the University of Michigan has developed an anticensorship system by which ISPs can provide ways around network censorship. J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, in a blog post claims that the technology "has the potential to shift the balance of power in the censorship arms race."
Social Networks: Thinking of the Children
By Linton Weeks | NPR | July11, 2011 | Andy Affleck is debating whether to allow his 11-year-old son, Jack, to have a Facebook account. Director of engineering at a small tech company near Providence, R.I., Affleck says he feels very strongly "that children need to be socialized in the online world just as much as they do in the real world." So Affleck the elder, who ponders these things on his Webcrumbs blog, is thinking about creating a Facebook page for Affleck the younger.
A world with too much freedom is better than one with not enough
By Suzanne Moore | The Guardian (UK) | July 02, 2011 | Hackers may know their systems, memes and modes, but often come up with morally specious claims for the cyber equivalent of kicking in a bus shelter. You do it because you can. Because you are bored. Because you hate everything. LulzSec were not so much into hacking the CIA but more in the business of bombarding Sonyand gaming sites with so much traffic they would collapse. This made them unpopular even with other hackers, who certainly don't want their porn and games ruined. We don't really know how to regard such people. The idea of putting Gary McKinnon in prison in America remains fundamentally ludicrous. The brilliant writer William Gibson - please let's drop the sci-fi label - wrote about such people as connoisseurs not of objects but of data. But they are criminals. They respect no boundaries. They steal. Privacy is violated. Something must be done! But what?
Dissolution of Hacker Group Might Not End Attacks
By Riva Richmond and Nick Bilton | New York Times | June 26, 2011 | But security experts said on Sunday that the dissolution of the group might not signal an end to the attacks, which have hit dozens of Web sites, including those of prominent targets like the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Senate, the Arizona state police and Sony.
Go Ahead, Share My Data
By Esther Dyson | Project Syndicate | June 23, 2011 | How important is privacy online?It is a well-known—though questionable—truth in the online community that consumers won't pay for privacy. Accordingly, most companies regard the entire issue warily. For them, privacy means expensive disclosure requirements, constraints on their ability to collect information about their customers, and a potential source of legal liabilities.
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