Notes from the Electronic Cottage 04/27/06

In this edition of the Electronic Cottage, we continue our series on privacy in the digital age. Tdoay, we look at the collusion between government agencies, which must operate under legal guidelines when they collect information on citizens, and private data aggregators, which operate under no such controls. The result? Government agencies such as Homeland Security spent about $30 million taxpayer dollars last year to buy data about U.S. citizens that the agencies would otherwise not have been able to collect. If you care about your personal privacy, you may want to begin leaving as thin a trail behind you as possible in physical space as well as cyberspace.

Notes from the Electronic Cottage 04/06/06

Part of our ongoing series on privacy in the digital age. This edition deals
with privacy in the commercial world – from companies amassing huge
databases about customers to those same companies losing control of that
data and what it means to you as a consumer and a citizen (the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, after all, buys information about citizens
from commercial providers that it is not allowed by law to collect itself).

Host: Jim Campbell