Wall Street Journal Covers Internet Privacy and Anonymity

Over the past few days, WSJ has been covering the various facets (and fallacies) of privacy as it relates to the Internet. The articles have been quite interesting and reveal a lot of the behind the scenes goings on by various companies and how they are able to track users and their online excursions. There's one article [5] that also covers privacy as it relates to cell phone usage and location tracking. They also do offer some advise on how to avoid being tracked as well as a reasonable glossary of some terms. All in all a very nice set of reads that are quite revealing.

The series is called "What They Know" [6,7] (very appropriate!).

Nicholas Carr's article "Tracking Is an Assault on Liberty, With Real Dangers" [2], Jessica Vascellaro's "Google Agonizes on Privacy as Ad World Vaults Ahead " [3] and "On the Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only" [4] by Emily Steel and Julia Angwin are particularly nice reads.

On a related note, Bruce Schneier[8] has an interesting blog entry [9] on social networking data (sort of tangential to the WSJ privacy articles that are more browsing/online related vs. the social networking aspects of conscious or intentional exposure). Of course there's also a Slashdot post[9] related to it. All in all there's suddently a spurt of opinions, ideas, thoughts (with their fair share of facts) and it's been a series of interesting reads.

URL[1]: http://online.wsj.com/public/search?article-doc-type={What+They+Know}&HEADER_TEXT=what+they+know
URL[2]: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703748904575411682714389888.html
URL[3]: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703309704575413553851854026.html
URL[4]: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703294904575385532109190198.html
URL[5]: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383522318244234.html
URL[6]: http://online.wsj.com/public/page/what-they-know-digital-privacy.html
URL[7]: http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk/
URL[8]: http://www.schneier.com/
URL[9]: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/08/a_taxonomy_of_s_1.html
URL[10]: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/08/10/1352244/Schneiers-Revised-Taxonomy-of-Social-Data

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