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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 4/19/18

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

The media show surrounding Congress people questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s privacy policies is blessedly over but the problem of what we can do as individuals to protect our personal information online goes on. Here are a few more ideas.

Here is a link to an article that may offer users of Facebook and Google a bit of a surprise: www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/technology/personaltech/i-downloaded-the-information-that-facebook-has-on-me-yikes.html

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 4/12/18

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Is there any way we can preserve some personal privacy online in our digital world?

Facebook has been much in the news lately since Cambridge Analytica scraped data on 87 million American Facebook users and used that information to try to influence voters in the last national election. But, of course, using people’s personal information to profile them is nothing new – it goes on all the time for all sorts of purposes. That’s the bargain we users make. We use free online services like Facebook, and those services sell our information to others who will pay for it. Is there any way we can preserve some personal privacy online in our digital world? Here is a first suggestion.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 3/8/12

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

It seems as if lots of the media as well as lots of politicians are upset over the privacy policies of Google, Facebook, and other commercial web companies, and with good reason. But users have a choice about what company’s services to use. There is no choice about government so it behooves us to keep up on current and future government use of technologies
that affect out personal privacy that most politicians don’t seem to want to talk about. Here are a few.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 7/21/11

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Facebook, the Apple Store, Amazon’s Kindle and ebook store – all are great conveniences for many people. But looked at from another point of view, they are essentially walled gardens that keep their customers inside, hemmed in by technological walls. And they are changing the nature of the web. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Let’s think about that question for a few minutes.

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