NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Campaigns to Track Voters with "Political Cookies"
Campaigns to Track Voters with "Political Cookies"
http://j.mp/M4qHis (Technology Review)
"The firm gathers publicly available voter files from all 50 states and
supplements this with records of political donations and other
profiles purchased from commercial data brokers, says CEO Jeff Dittus.
Then, working with about 100 high-traffic websites that register their
users, they can match the offline data to the online identities of
individuals."
- - -
While I generally feel that way too much angst is directed Web site ad
personalization and related tracking, the creepy line is breached for
me when non-Web activities (and related identity linkages at some
level) are merged with online actions, especially without users'
active notification and specific informed consent. This is
particularly of concern when political activities are involved, since
the main goal of such systems seems to be to pitch what cynical
observers of the political process might call personalized lies. The
underlying technology is not new. I've been publicly discussing what
I consider to be abuses in this realm by Aristotle, in postings I've
made since late in the last century! And to see Aristotle now
salivating at the prospect of how online voting would play into all
this has to be one of the most chilling warnings against the utterly
unworkable and dangerous concept of online voting that has yet been
explicitly stated, albeit unintentionally.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org
Founder:
- Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren / Twitter: http://vortex.com/t-lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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