Simon Willison’s Weblog

Google Reader ruins Christmas (via) New sharing feature automatically reveals shared items to Gmail contacts, causing political rows.

# 25th December 2007, 2:59 pm / google-reader, sharing, politics, socialnetworking, google, privacy

Deconstructing Facebook Beacon JavaScript. How Facebook’s new Beacon service (also known as “Facebook ruined Christmas”) actually works.

# 25th November 2007, 9:20 pm / javascript, facebook, beacon, privacy

Is Facebook Really Censoring Search When It Suits Them? Apparently MoveOn’s group “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!” stopped showing up in search results for “privacy”—the search claimed 17 results but suspiciously only showed 16.

# 23rd November 2007, 7:50 am / facebook, censorship, conspiracy, moveon, privacy

Amazon Gets an SLA (But I Still Can’t Use It). “Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Acts (FIPPA) don’t allow me to store sensitive information (e.g., students’ work) in jurisdictions that permit secret warrants, like those mandated by the USA PATRIOT Act.”

# 9th October 2007, 3 pm / patriotact, privacy, canada, ontario, fippa, gregwilson, s3, amazon

Firefox 3 Antiphishing Sends Your URLs To Google. Stories like this crop up every now and then, but no one ever seems to mention that the Google Toolbar has been doing this since it was released (more than five years ago) provided you have PageRank display turned on.

# 25th September 2007, 11:04 pm / pagerank, google, privacy, firefox, mozilla, firefox3, toolbars, google-toolbar

Sun’s OpenID IdP: Real vs Fake. The thinking behind Sun’s decision to allow users of their OpenID provider to pick fake names and assign personal e-mail addresses.

# 25th September 2007, 10:39 pm / privacy, identity, openid, pii, sun, sunmicrosystems, laurenwood

Sun’s OpenID IdP: Data Governance. Lauren Wood explains the checklist used to ensure Sun’s OpenID provider adequately respected user privacy and data governance (what happens to the data that is stored).

# 22nd September 2007, 8:50 pm / openid, sun, sunmicrosystems, laurenwood, governance, datagovernance, privacy

Visual Security: 9-block IP Identification. Smart (and pretty) trick for showing a representation tied to a commenter’s IP address without affecting their privacy.

# 18th January 2007, 4:55 pm / ip, donpark, 9block, privacy

non-consensual http user tracking using caches. Interesting security issue involving HTTP caching headers

# 20th January 2004, 10:37 pm / security, caching, privacy