Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Schleswig-Holstein is a small German state located at the very northern tip of the Federal Republic. It is home for enchanting cities such as Kiel and Lübeck, long coastlines overlooking the Baltic See to the east and the North See to the west. Other than scenic landscape, rich culture and a border with Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein also has a dynamic privacy commissioner. Dr. Thilo Weichert heads the ULD, which translates as the SH’s Independent Center for Privacy Protection. His administration published last week a press release (English version here) that has been attracting much attention since (e.g., here and here).

I have written an article on the future of sovereignty in the age of Wikileaks. I welcome Your comments.

"The hidden power structures and the inner workings of these states within the state are exposed by another imperium in imperio, a secretive organization, whose agenda is far from transparent, whose members, resources are unknown, holding back an indefinite amount of information both on itself and on its opponents. The mantra of Wikileaks supporters and the mantra of state and corporate executives are shockingly identical: “We share no information on ourselves; we gather information on everyone else. Only our secrets are valid secrets.” The Eye of Providence on the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States, surrounded by the words Annuit Cœptis (He approves our undertakings), and Novus Ordo Seclorum, (New Order of the Ages) could very well be the seal of Wikileaks as well."

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1780519
http://www.warsystems.hu/fokuszban/wikileaks-and-freedom-autonomy-and-sovereignty-in-the-cloud/

Here's a preview of my forthcoming paper on robot ethics (with co-authors Keith Abney and George Bekey) in Artificial Intelligence journal, one of the best in its field.

I’ve just returned from a week at the Schloss Dagstuhl Leibniz Center for Informatics, where I attended a “Perspectives Workshop” on “Online Privacy: Towards Informational Self-Determination on the Internet”.

The tension between Google and data protection agencies intensified over the last two days. The Data Protection Commissioner in Hamburg is apparently unhappy with the changes Google has introduced to Google Analytics intending to square it with European data protection regulation. The problem seems to be that the "opting out" tool the new GA version offers cannot be applied with some Internet browsers such as Safari.
There will be surely more to come on this. Meanwhile, legal counsels begin to warn their German large-sites-based clients against possible sanctions for using GA.

Privacy is something we lose actively, not passively. Listen to the verbs of our digital lives:

Security expert Bruce Schneier today posts about the taxonomy of social networking data. He describes five types of data:

"1. Service data. Service data is the data you need to give to a social networking site in order to use it. It might include your legal name, your age, and your credit card number.

The very clever folks at the ACLU of Northern California have put out a Facebook quiz that helps users understand what quiz app developers can find out about them. Hint: it's a lot. This work builds on a June report on the same topic. Congrats!

This week, Harvard’s Cyberlaw Clinic filed an amicus brief with the Illinois Appellate Court in support of hefty procedural safeguards to protect the anonymity of online speakers in defamation lawsuits. The brief was a collaborative effort of a number of organizations, including Berkman’s Citizen Media Law Project, Gannett Corporation, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. While I agree with the fundamental premise that plaintiffs should have to do more than simply serve a subpoena to compel the defendants to reveal the identity of online speakers, in my view, the position staked out by the amicus coalition simply goes too far.