Category Archives: Surveillance

Social networking word-of-the-day: “thinvisibility”

A new word for Facebookers and social networkers who cavalierly post embarrassing information about themselves to the web: thinvisibility:  Here’s a starting definition: Thinvisibility: n. Being neither completely visible nor completely invisible. Being a tiny, shiny needle in a haystack of information overload. Being invisible to everyone except data aggregators and digital preservationists such as Google, […]

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Ends, means, and cell phone surveillance

As Wired.com reports, researchers affiliated with Northeastern University “secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States through their cell phone use and concluded that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.” In the report on their study in the journal Nature (excerpt available online), the authors stated: [O]ur […]

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The electronic leash: whatever happened to trusting your kids?

Verizon Wireless now offers a service that allows parents to track their kids’ movements through cellphones. According to News.com: Parents can use the service to set up geographic limits and receive text alerts if their children, who also carry phones, go too far from home. The service also lets parents check where their offspring are […]

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