That’s the title of my Slaw post today.   It reads:

Boing Boing has a recent post that refers to a day of protest being organized in the EU. Some excerpts:

An international protest against undue surveillance is being held next month on the 11th of October. It is ‘a broad movement of campaigners and organizations is calling on everybody to join action against excessive surveillance by governments and businesses’. We need to get this on the radar for the elections in the USA this year, the EU parliamentary elections next year and many more.

People who constantly feel watched and under surveillance cannot freely and courageously stand up for their rights and for a just society. Mass surveillance is thereby threatening the fabric of a democratic and open society. Mass surveillance is also endangering the work and commitment of civil society organizations.

My personal view is that most so called security measures, including CCTV is security theatre that does not have any significant effect on actual security. For those that say “if you are doing nothing wrong, what’s the problem”, take a look at this Washington Post article.

I look forward to the results of the Federal Privacy Commissioner’s research into public surveillance techniques and technology

David Fraser points out that Google has announced that they are reducing the time before they anonymize IP addresses on their server logs from 18 months to 9 months.   That’s in reponse to privacy regulators.

Google’s blog entry on the point is a good read as it discusses the trade-off’s between privacy and the advantages they see from keeping the info longer. 

It states in part:

After months of work our engineers developed methods for preserving more of the data’s utility while also anonymizing IP addresses sooner. We haven’t sorted out all of the implementation details, and we may not be able to use precisely the same methods for anonymizing as we do after 18 months, but we are committed to making it work.

While we’re glad that this will bring some additional improvement in privacy, we’re also concerned about the potential loss of security, quality, and innovation that may result from having less data. As the period prior to anonymization gets shorter, the added privacy benefits are less significant and the utility lost from the data grows. So, it’s difficult to find the perfect equilibrium between privacy on the one hand, and other factors, such as innovation and security, on the other. Technology will certainly evolve, and we will always be working on ways to improve privacy for our users, seeking new innovations, and also finding the right balance between the benefits of data and advancement of privacy.

Read David’s post

For the London Free Press – September 8, 2008

Read this on Canoe

A U.K. court recently ordered an ex-employee of a recruitment firm to disclose details of his profile, business contacts and e-mails at his social networking site, LinkedIn, to his former employer.

So who owns those contacts — the employee or the employer?

LinkedIn is a social networking site used to maintain contacts, and exchange information, ideas and opportunities. One of its functions is to network for jobs and marketing one’s services. The ex-employee had invited his employer’s customers to join his network at LinkedIn while he was still in their employ. The employer claimed those contacts belonged to them.

He allegedly used his LinkedIn network to approach customers for his own rival business, which had been set up a few weeks before the end of his employment.

The decision shows the tension between employees being encouraged by their employers to use social networking websites, but at the same time trying to keep the contacts confidential at the end of their employment.

Professional relationships are established in many ways in the workforce. Social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn can assist and ease the development of these “business” relationships. The connections you make can blur the line between professional and personal.

The real legal issue is not ownership, but whether the employer is entitled to the contact list, and whether the ex-employee is restricted in any way from using that information.

The starting point is that customer lists are the employer’s property, and employees and former employees should use those for their employer’s purposes, not personal gain.

What ex-employees can do with former employer contact information depends on a variety of factors, such as whether the contacts are customers, what the ex-employer’s role was, what obligations are in place for confidentiality, non-competition and non-solicitation, what personal or pre-existing relationship exists between the ex-employee and customer, and the reason the ex-employee wants to contact them.

The answer should be the same whether the information is in a company database, or whether duplicates are kept by the employee on a social network site or some means not controlled by the company.

The wrinkle is that the blurring of work and personal, and the use of social networking sites, makes it more difficult to determine whether the information is corporate, personal, or mixed.

It would be an easier decision to make if all the contact information was stored on a company-owned or -controlled system.

Equally difficult is the issue of whether information on the social networking site should be provided to the employer on the basis that since it was created as part of the employee’s role in the company, it should remain a company asset for others to use.

The lesson in this case is that both employers and employees should think about how workers use social media for business purposes, and consider and communicate the expectations that go along with it.

The first ad is out.  I found it amusing, and wonder where they are taking it – but then that’s the point.  Was anyone really expecting a hard sell from this?   For a geek tech (former) CEO, Gates holds his own with Seinfeld. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Chris Anderson posts on his Long Tail blog about an interview he had with Google’s economist-in-residence Hal Varian on the economics of free.  It includes a list of 14 business models that allow creators to make money even if they can’t stop others from distributing it for free.  

It attracted a comment from another author who describes the trend as attention based revenues displacing copy based revenues.

Read Chris Anderson’s post

Read Gerd Leonhard’s post

Thats the title of my weekly Slaw post.

It reads:

The combination of the launch of the Google Chrome browser, and the current PC hardware refresh occuring in our office got me thinking about programming philosophies.

Chrome reviews say it is faster and uses fewer computing resources than the competion.  And the reason we replace our PC’s every few years is not so much that the hardware is broken, but that the computing resources software requires are constantly increasing.

To some extent that is understandable, and just the nature of the beast.  Hardware is constantly improving, so it is natural for software designers to take advantage of that.

But that advantage should be used to improve the software – not to get sloppy about programming techniques.  You sometimes have to wonder how efficiently current software is being coded.

When I learned how to program (I won’t admit how long ago that was), we were taught that computer memory and processing speed were precious and limited commodities, and the best coding to perform a task used as few resources as you could get it to use.  The downside was that it lead to the Y2K problem, and the code was sometimes hard to follow – but it was efficient.

I still think, though, that the basic philosophy was sound.  In my view the best software will always be the one that gets the job done using the least computing resources.

David Fraser points to a blog called Photo Attorney, by a lawyer who specializes in photography law.  I’m adding it to my RSS feeds.  As David points out, there have been many instances where people taking photos have been given a hard time.  Sometimes in the name of privacy, sometimes in the name of security. 

Read David’s post

Go to the Photo Attorney blog