Rights

New Zealand’s political climate isn’t too dissimilar from ours right now. They’re mulling over plain packaging, a carbon tax, a fibre-broadband network and the controversial issue of same-sex marriage. A staunch opponent to the marriage equality movement is Family First New Zealand — a political party that recently collected 50,000 signatures against the move. Little did they know that as they passed around slips of paper to be signed, their domain name had fallen out of registration. It was then swooped on by none other than a pro-Marriage Equality movement.

This means that whenever someone goes to www.familyfirst.co.nz, they are automatically redirected to www.marriageequality.co.nz, where they’ll find a whole raft of pro-marriage equality content — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Many businesses today find themselves locked in an arms race with competitors to see who can convert customer secrets into the most pennies. To try to win, they are building perfect digital dossiers, to use a phrase coined by Daniel Solove, massive data stores containing hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands, of facts about every member of our society. In my work, I’ve argued that these databases will grow to connect every individual to at least one closely guarded secret. This might be a secret about a medical condition, family history, or personal preference. It is a secret that, if revealed, would cause more than embarrassment or shame; it would lead to serious, concrete, devastating harm. And these companies are combining their data stores, which will give rise to a single, massive database. I call this the Database of Ruin. Once we have created this database, it is unlikely we will ever be able to tear it apart.

I have become convinced that my earlier, bleak predictions about the Database of Ruin were in fact understated, arriving before it was clear how Big Data would accelerate the problem. Consider the most famous recent example of big data’s utility in invading personal privacy: Target’s analytics team can determine which shoppers are pregnant, and even predict their delivery dates, by detecting subtle shifts in purchasing habits. This is only one of countless similarly invasive Big Data efforts being pursued. In the absence of intervention, soon companies will know things about us that we do not even know about ourselves. This is the exciting possibility of Big Data, but for privacy, it is a recipe for disaster — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Many of us will accumulate vast libraries of digital books and music over the course of our lifetimes. But when we die, our collections of words and music may expire with us.

Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated.

And one’s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs, says Evan Carroll, co-author of Your Digital Afterlife. Legally dividing one account among several heirs would also be extremely difficult.

Part of the problem is that with digital content, one doesn’t have the same rights as with print books and CDs. Customers own a license to use the digital files—but they don’t actually own them — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Twitter has brought down a hail of critical tweeting on its own head by suspending the account of a British newspaper’s Los Angeles correspondent following his acerbic reporting of NBC’s coverage of the Olympics.

The social media network hummed with the indignation of thousands of its users after the Twitter feed of Guy Adams of the Independent disappeared. The paper’s deputy editor, Archie Bland, confirmed the suspension, calling it heavy-handed.

NBC said it had complained to Twitter after Adams published the email address of one of its senior bosses. We filed a complaint with Twitter because a user tweeted the personal information of one of our executives. According to Twitter, this is a violation of their privacy policy. Twitter alone levies discipline.

Rachael Horwitz, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco-based firm, confirmed that it does not actively monitor users’ accounts, and added that it was company policy not to comment on individual users — via redwolf.newsvine.com