According to the report: “As a result of these divergent trends, in 2009 the typical household headed by the older adult had $170,494 in net worth, compared with just $3,662 for the typical household headed by the younger adult. People generally accumulate wealth as they age, so it is not unusual to find large age-based gaps on this measure. However, the current gap is unprecedented. In 1984, the age-based wealth gap had been 10:1. By 2009, it had ballooned to 47:1.”
From the article: “The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Monday finalized a landmark settlement with Google in which the company has agreed to be audited for its privacy practices for the next 20 years … The commission charged that Google engaged in unfair and deceptive practices in 2010 when it launched Google Buzz by leading users of its Gmail system to believe that they could easily opt-out of the social network. The controls that would enable them to do that were ineffective, the FTC charged at the time. Also the tools that Google created to enable users to limit the sharing of users’ personal information were confusing and difficult to find, the agency alleged.”
… the computer is a metaphysical machine. Children too are provoked. The computer creates new occasions for thinking through the fundamental questions to which childhood must give a response, among them the question “what is life?”
From the article: “Young adults are the recession’s lost generation. In record numbers, they’re struggling to find work, shunning long-distance moves to live with mom and dad, delaying marriage and raising kids out of wedlock, if they’re becoming parents at all. The unemployment rate for them is the highest since World War II, and they risk living in poverty more than others – nearly 1 in 5.”
From the article: “By winning 8.9 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election in [Berlin], these political pirates surpassed — blew away, really — every expectation for what was supposed to be a fringe, one-issue party promoting Internet freedom. The Pirates so outstripped expectations that all 15 candidates on their list won seats … The question that members of Germany’s political establishment are now asking after the insurgent party stormed the statehouse is this: Are the Pirates merely the punch line to a joke, a focus of protest, a reflection of electoral disgust with all established political parties — or an exciting experiment in a new form of online democracy?”
From the article: “the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday proposed long-awaited changes to regulations covering online privacy for children … The proposed revisions expand the definition of “personal information” to include a child’s location, along with any personal data collected through the use of cookies for the purposes of targeted advertising. It also covers facial recognition technology.”
Mike German, ACLU policy counsel and former FBI agent, was recently on Reason.tv discussing domestic surveillance in post-9/11 America. German covers the U.S. government’s growing interest in collecting personal data, the development of data fusion centers, and the erosion of existing privacy protections.
Speaking specifically about the 4th Amendment, Brown explains:
The way the 4th Amendment protections work with your personal papers, requires probable cause and a warrant before the government can search your desk to look through your papers. Unfortunately, now most of our personal papers are kept on 3rd party servers. It’s our email that’s stored remotely. Every thought that we have we hit the search engines to find out more about the subject we’re thinking bout. All that gets recorded by 3rd parties, and that information doesn’t have the same 4th Amendment protections.
The hypocrisy is extraordinary. For decades the U.S. government has extended and enhanced intellectual property protections. The rationale has been that the laws governing property ownership in the physical environment must also apply in the digital environment. Downloading a Beatles album from Pirate Bay is treated the same as shoplifting a Beatles album from Walmart. But, when it comes to personal property in the digital environment (i.e. your data) we see an erosion of what little protections existed in the physical environment. In short: protect intellectual property, collect personal data.
About a year ago MediaNews Group, publisher of 40 newspapers, signed a deal with Righthaven, a law firm. The deal allowed Righthaven to file copyright infringement lawsuits on MediaNews Group’s behalf in exchange for 50% of any settlement/verdict. Now, MediaNews Group has decided to part ways with Righthaven and John Paton, the chief executive of MediaNews Group, is quoted in Wired as saying:
“The issues about copyright are real … But the idea that you would hire someone on an — essentially — success fee to run around and sue people at will who may or may not have infringed as a way of protecting yourself … does not reflect how news is created and disseminated in the modern world … I come from the idea that it was a dumb idea from the start.” (emphasis added)
The idea that one could monetize news content (or any other content) by restricting its circulation and suing individual bloggers was always a dubious one. The RIAA and many other organizations that took this approach previously now appear to be abandoning it. And, as the Wired article also notes, Righthaven has lost a string of its lawsuits over the question of whether it even has the right to sue over copyright infringement when they are not the actual copyright holder.
From the article: “U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies now collect, store and analyze vast quantities of digital data produced by law-abiding Americans. The data mining receives limited congressional oversight, rare judicial review and almost no public scrutiny. Thanks to new laws and technologies, authorities track and eavesdrop on Americans as they never could before, hauling in billions of bank records, travel receipts and other information. In several cases, they have wiretapped conversations between lawyers and defendants, challenging the legal principle that attorney-client communication is inviolate.”
From the article: “The New York Police Department compiled lists of mosques and Muslim businesses it saw as potential security risks for reasons that included endorsing conservative religious views or having devout customers … That effort has benefited from federal money and an unusually close relationship with the CIA, one that at times blurred the lines between domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering.”
