Last week the Wall Street Journal published an article accusing four online advertisers—Google, Vibrant Media, Media Innovation Group and PointRoll—of using special code on web pages to circumvent the privacy settings in the Apple Safari web browser for the purpose of “tracking the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.” The Safari web browser is used by approximately 7 percent of desktop Internet users and 24 percent of mobile users. Google responded...

A few days ago, I received an email from an advocacy group alerting me to the fact that Google was causing trouble again on the consumer privacy front. Like any good Internet populist, I immediately went to sharpen my pitchfork and grab a torch to join the masses in public outrage. Unfortunately, my pitchfork was broken and I was all out of torches. Dismayed I went online to buy new ones. Unfortunately, when I tried to search online for “pitchfork”, the top search results directed me to a music...

A bill waiting for Gov. Cuomo’s signature in New York would restrict insurers from mandating or incentivizing participants to use a mail-order pharmacy. The “Anti-Mandatory Mail Order Pharmacy Bill” (Assembly Bill 5502-B) is being pushed as a measure to enable consumer choice. In fact, it will raise health care costs and ultimately hurt consumers. The legislation requires that insurers allow individuals to fill a prescription at any mail-order or retail pharmacy as long as the retail pharmacy...

We live in a global economy and society built on our investments in computer and network technology. Our connectedness—our ability to work and communicate easily with those outside of our borders–is the foundation of our digital economy. Policymakers are increasingly recognizing that the free flow of information online is important both for promoting democratic values (see Secretary Clinton’s remarks last year on Internet Freedom) and for promoting commerce (see the Department of Commerce’s Internet...

This week has seen a flurry of articles on the Facebook Photo Tagging feature after the security firm Sophos posted a story on its blog noting that this feature, which had previously been limited to North American users, had now been extended to other regions. The Photo Tagging feature makes it easier for users to tag their friends in a photo. Initially, this feature required users to label every photo manually. Not surprisingly users asked for an easier way to do this and Facebook responded with...

While there are an array of great things going on currently in e-government in the U.S. government, including a shift to cloud computing, more efforts at using mobile platforms and social media, and efforts to streamline and conslidate the hundreds if not thousands of legacy systems, at the end of the day the way the public still mostly interacts with government digitally is through government agency web sites.  And yet, too many of them remain user-unfriendly and poorly maintained. A case in...

The announcement yesterday morning may have been unexpected, but the revelations were not surprising. Yet today we find ourselves asking, how did we get to this point? Rumors, conspiracy theories, and unsubstantiated claims do not belong in the media, yet for the last week these had reached a new high as allegations, new and old, were endlessly repeated. Virtually every mainstream media outlet covered this story extensively, giving airtime, bandwidth and column space to unsupported claims and...

Last week two O’Reilly analysts posted a video explaining that Apple’s iOS 4, the operating system used on the iPhone and iPad, contained code that automatically logged a variety of time-stamped data that could be used to pinpoint where a device had been.This would allow someone with access to this data to construct a detailed picture of the device’s location history. Notably, the phone did not log GPS location data, but instead recorded location-related data based on cell towers and wifi networks...

Traditional indices such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) or the Fortune 500 focus on top performers without any considerations other than their market capitalization, share price, revenue, or other 20th-century measures of business performance. But in a “Technology Economy” technology is a strategic lever, a tool to drive new business growth, protect revenue, reduce business costs, and manage risk. So let’s do an experiment and look at a “new age” Dow Jones Industrial Average – a market...

In a recent Politico op-ed Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) wrote, “Online trackers claim the information they collect is anonymous and helps enhance the user’s experience. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. The truth is it only takes 33 ‘bits’ of information to uniquely identify someone.” While she was certainly not the first one to make this statement (indeed Arvind Narayanan at Stanford dedicates his blog “33 Bits of Entropy” to this topic), this assertion—that individuals can be identified with...