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State of privacy illustrated (by a tech-literate law student)

August 14, 2013 By Anne Leave a Comment

Its creator, 27-year-old Brendan O’Connor calls it “CreepyDOL” (because it is certainly creepy). You could also call it Personal PI, since anyone with a portable, very hide-able little device like this would hardly need to hire a private investigator. In fact, this spying device written up in the New York Times indicates not only that the private-eye business is on the wane, but also that we have less privacy than any social-media critic ever dreamed and we have a lot more to worry about than creepy Facebook ads. Including “Big Brother.” What O’Connor created is “a data visualization system to monitor what the sensors picked up: all the wireless traffic emitted by every nearby wireless device, including smartphones.” And what do they pick up? Reams of information – the Times’s Somini Sengupta goes into detail. She writes that O’Connor never tested the system on anyone but himself – because he’s a law student and founder of a security firm and knows the laws and colleagues who’ve run afoul of them – but he presented it at both the DefCon and Black Hat security conferences in Las Vegas last week, “including at a session for young people” as “a window into how cheap and easy it is to erect a surveillance apparatus.”

So contrary to popular opinion, it’s not just teens who might have large “invisible audiences” in social media and technology, social media services aren’t the biggest sources of privacy leakage, and social media users aren’t their own worst (potential) enemy. And when parents of software code writers and hackers talk with their kids about the job and income opportunities in computer and network security, they may also want to talk about the ethics and laws Sengupta touches on in her article.

Related links

  • From my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid, “Ways to make your online activities more secure”
  • “Major update from Pew on teens’ privacy practices in social media”
  • About privacy risk associated more with girls than boys in some media coverage: “Noodz, selfies, sexts, etc., Part 3: bias in the news coverage”
  • “Why we do ‘let our guard down’: Online privacy”
  • “Smart public image management in social media”
  • “A new book & fresh look at online privacy”
  • Of social media researcher danah boyd’s 2010 keynote on online privacy at the South by Southwest Interactive conference
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Filed Under: Ethics & Etiquette, Literacy & Citizenship, Privacy Tagged With: app, Brendan O'Connor, consumer privacy, CreepyDol, mobile privacy, monitoring, online privacy, spying, surveillance

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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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