{"id":665,"date":"2004-10-24T02:51:06","date_gmt":"2004-10-24T06:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2004\/10\/24\/spyware-privacy-and-the-commons-of"},"modified":"2004-10-24T02:51:06","modified_gmt":"2004-10-24T06:51:06","slug":"spyware-privacy-and-the-commons-of-popularity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2004\/10\/24\/spyware-privacy-and-the-commons-of-popularity\/","title":{"rendered":"Spyware, privacy, and the commons of popularity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a565'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Alexa.com produces <b>spyware<\/b> many love to hate.  It is friendly, as spyware goes, but both prevalent and public with how it uses its aggregated information, unlike private spyware like <i>Google&#8217;s own<\/i> toolbar.  In general, groups that collect data on web-surfing traffic are <b>aggregating<\/b> cast-off bits and pieces into something useful, interesting, and slightly invasive.  By the time <b>Technorati<\/b> can tell you how many computers from suburban homes have been used during the day by Movable Type bloggers from Houston to visit your site from a bookmark for more then ten minutes at a time&#8230; even it will be approaching spyware.<\/p>\n<p>So, is there an ideal way to aggregate information?  To <b>collect<\/b> it?  When I visit your site, is it okay for you to note this?  When I write you, how much <b>metadata<\/b> about my mail to you can you pass on to others before I am allowed to take offense?  &#8220;I got 50 messages today&#8221;  &#8220;Joe wrote me twice today&#8221;  <i>&#8220;Mary Cc:ed a silly email to 80 of us during lunch&#8221;<\/i>  &#8220;Ranga wrote: &#8216;My sister just came back from bailing Larry P. out of jail for pimping; she said his expensive new phone (410-555-2310) is already disconnected&#8230; crazy.'&#8221;  <i>&#8220;I hate mailreaders, so from now on I&#8217;m just automatically uploading my email to <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/mailboxen.xml\">a public rss feed<\/a>.&#8221;<\/i>  <font size=\"3\">&#8230;<\/font><\/p>\n<p>Talk to me, people.  I want to know what you think about all of this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alexa.com produces spyware many love to hate. It is friendly, as spyware goes, but both prevalent and public with how it uses its aggregated information, unlike private spyware like Google&#8217;s own toolbar. In general, groups that collect data on web-surfing traffic are aggregating cast-off bits and pieces into something useful, interesting, and slightly invasive. By [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-la-mod"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}