Woosh water. Why the credit card?

Troubling report in Haaretz about the Woosh startup that sets up public fountains in Tel Aviv, asking users to identify. Apparently, their agreement with the municipality requires them to share user data with the municipality. Its not clear how this agreement follows their privacy policy (Hebrew). A quick observation: data privacy is everywhere, even in the water that we drink. Another quick observation: startups need to think about privacy from the start, otherwise they are in trouble.

Some survey statistics about social network use in the U.S., by Pew.

New location prediction algorithms.

Michael Birenhack interviewed by Gal Gabai on the publicness of judgment decisions in the Israeli law (Hebrew).

The program and papers of PETS’13 (The 13th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium) is out. Some interesting stuff there, including Privacy Technologies: An Annotated Syllabus and The need for flow fingerprints to link correlated network flows.

Immersion is a powerful visualization tool for email inboxes (see that cute bubble graph above). Also, an interesting way to understand what can possibly be known about us just by looking at our email inbox metadata. Its privacy controls are very simple, but very powerful: you can delete everything when you log out.

 

immersion

Simple privacy UI