Benlog

I was speaking with a colleague yesterday about Loopt, the location-based social network, the rise of location-based services and the incredible privacy challenges they present. I heard the Loopt folks give a talk a few months ago, and I was generally impressed with the measures they’re taking to protect their users’ data.
I particularly enjoyed the [...]

Everyone is talking about the privacy disaster that was the Google Buzz launch, and oh my goodness it was. I’ve never been so thankful that I don’t use gmail. I’m frankly surprised that they didn’t do a smaller beta first, or that there isn’t a group at Google charged with thinking about the privacy implications [...]

A few days ago, mint.com, a fantastic online personal finance tool, was sold to Intuit. A number of users are disappointed, and some are downright pissed, claiming the “next generation bends over.” Well, first of all, that’s ridiculous, a company sells when it wants to sell, and there are may ways to change the world, [...]

On Friday, I attended Social Network Security 2009 at Stanford. This was a fantastic get-together, with some very interesting info from Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Loopt, and the research front. I have some notes, mostly from the first half of the day, at which point my laptop battery ran out. Time to upgrade to the 7-hour [...]

The US government has just announced a pilot program to integrate OpenID (and Information Cards) into public government web sites. This is very interesting news, as it will likely catalyze even greater OpenID deployment and use.
[I've poo-poo'ed OpenID here and here, because of phishing and privacy concerns. I'm still very worried. I've suggested ways to [...]

For more than 10 years now, I’ve used custom email addresses when I log in to a web site I don’t fully trust, e.g. ben-SITENAME at adida.net. Until recently, the only time I’ve actually been able to trace emails to their source is when I saw how Democrats reused some of their mailing lists during [...]

The Engaging Data Conference at MIT, which brings together a number of interesting folks around the management of personal electronic data, is happening in October. The deadline for papers is this week, so submit a paper now if you’ve got some good ideas to share.

Facebook is an impressive company, they’ve done and continue to do some very amazing things. And I admit I certainly didn’t see them coming 4 years ago. But okay, come on:

“No one wants to live in a surveillance society,” Zuckerberg adds, “which, if you take that to its extreme, could be where Google is going.”

Umm, [...]

I wrote briefly about Google Wave, and Ben Laurie points out that my statement on the Google Wave trust model is misleading. He’s right. I said that the Google Wave trust model is the same as email (and thus I think Google Wave will succeed). What my words unfortunately and misleadingly implied is that it’s [...]

First impressions / predictions on Google Wave, Google’s new communication idea/product/protocol/service:

because it’s open-source, federated, and follows the same trust patterns as email, it will be successful
whatever authentication protocol Google Wave uses will be a significant (if not a crushing) player in the web authentication space, and that’s not a bad thing because it [...]