More google insights fun. Here’s the list of the top google searches from Nigeria: Note that five of the top ten searches are for a tool called email extractor lite 1.4, which is a tool that pulls emails from a block of text. In other words, it is useful for harvesting email addresses for spam. […]
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Nigerian Searches for Spam
12-Aug-08Digital Cameras v. Nigeria
12-Aug-08One of my guiding theories of the modern media / advertising landscape is that the extensive real time surveillance of consumers by online advertisers and content providers encourages the growth of content about digital cameras (the content about which is easily monetized) at the expense of hard news, especially international news about developing countries like […]
I’ve been playing around with the new Google Insights for Search, which is targeted to advertisers but is terribly interesting for anyone interested in media issues. Here’s a comparison of searches for newspaper, blog, and magazine: Worldwide U.S. Nigeria Leaving aside the obvious qualifications about the limitations of this metric, the fact that blogs have […]
FlyClear Data Breach
08-Aug-08FlyClear, the company that handles an express lane security clearance in some U.S. airports, recently lost control of a laptop that contained personal data used to verify the identity of subscribers. The company has repeatedly pointed out that no social security numbers or credit card numbers were included in the data as if that’s the […]
I’ve been looking at deep packet inspection / targeted advertising company Phorm for the past couple of days and have found a clear and simple case of Phorm violating its own privacy policy in contradiction to Ernst & Young’s audit of the company’s systems. Phorm has been energetically defending itself against complaints about the privacy […]
Passport Security
04-Jul-08The state department released the results of an audit yesterday that found that large numbers of government workers (meaning both employees and contractors) have been regularly accessing the passport files of celebrities: The 192 million passport files maintained by the State Department contain individuals’ passport applications, which include data such as Social Security numbers, physical […]
Google Adwords Category Exclusion
24-Jun-08Google recently added category exclusion to its adwords system, allowing advertisers to choose not to support content that deals with topics such as “death & tragedy” and “military & international conflict”. The new category exclusion feature allows an advertiser exclude from its content network any pages that belong to a specified set of topics or […]
Two Spectacles
28-Mar-08I’ve been pondering how the concept of spectacle fits in with surveillance. In particular, I’ve been bouncing around two different concepts of the spectacle, one by Michel Foucault and the other by Scott Bukatman. Here’s an execution spectacle in Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: ‘Finally, he was quartered,’ recounts the Gazette d’Amsterdam of 1 April […]
Google Privacy Videos
06-Mar-08I recently ran across a series of videos produced by Google to explain the data collection of its search engine. Ms. Oyhe, an attractive, professional, and terribly reassuring support engineer explains what sorts of data Google collects and, implicitly, why users should not be overly concerned about the data collection: To improve out search results […]
