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Category Archives: E-Commerce

Owner of Philadelphia Media Network transfers newspapers and website to nonprofit

Via Philly.com – “On Tuesday, in a meeting with employees and then at a news conference at the Constitution Center, H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest [sole owner of Inquirer and the Daily News]  formally announced the details of a complicated transaction designed to ensure that quality journalism endures in Philadelphia for generations. The move places the region’s… Continue Reading

Report From the Student Privacy Frontlines: 2015 in Review

EFF: “This year the fight to protect student privacy hit a boiling point with our Spying on Students campaign, an effort to help students, parents, teachers, and school administrators learn more about the privacy issues surrounding school-issued devices and cloud services. We’re also working to push vendors like Google to put students and their parents… Continue Reading

Measuring Privacy: Using Context to Expose Confounding Variables

Martin, Kirsten E. and Nissenbaum, Helen, Measuring Privacy: Using Context to Expose Confounding Variables (December 31, 2015). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2709584 “Past privacy surveys often omit important contextual factors and yield cloudy, potentially misleading results about how people understand and value privacy. We revisit two historically influential measurements of privacy that have shaped… Continue Reading

FTC – Native Advertising: A Guide for Businesses

“Marketers and publishers are using innovative methods to create, format, and deliver digital advertising. One form is “native advertising,” content that bears a similarity to the news, feature articles, product reviews, entertainment, and other material that surrounds it online. But as native advertising evolves, are consumers able to differentiate advertising from other content? The Federal… Continue Reading

Americans conflicted about sharing personal information with companies

Pew Fact Tank – “A significant minority of American adults have felt confused, discouraged or impatient when trying to make decisions about sharing their personal information with companies. When asked if they felt confident they understood what would be done with their personal information as they were deciding whether or not to share it, 50%… Continue Reading

Google hardware and software monitoring millions of students in classrooms

Washington Post: “In public classrooms across the country, the corporate name that is fast becoming as common as pencils and erasers is Google. More than half of K-12 laptops or tablets purchased by U.S. schools in the third quarter were Chromebooks, cheap laptops that run Google software. Beyond its famed Web search, the company freely… Continue Reading

Amazon owns the e-commerce market and soon the delivery of products too?

Via ReCode – “Macquarie estimates that Amazon accounts for half of all sales growth in U.S. e-commerce, meaning online retailers not named Amazon are battling for around 50 cents of every new $1 spent online. As if that weren’t enough, Amazon also accounts for about a quarter of every new $1 of growth in all… Continue Reading

Rand – National Security Implications of Virtual Currency

Joshua Baron, Angela O’Mahony, David Manheim, Cynthia Dion-Schwarz: “This report examines the feasibility for non-state actors, including terrorist and insurgent groups, to increase their political and/or economic power by deploying a virtual currency (VC) for use in regular economic transactions. A VC, such as Bitcoin, is a digital representation of value that can be transferred,… Continue Reading

Despite predictions, print books are alive and well

Pleased to share this article via Quartz – Against all odds, print books are on the rise again in the US “For the last half decade, ever since digital books and e-readers first came on the scene, news headlines have been at war. “The physical book is dead,” some reports declared, while others vehemently argued… Continue Reading

Test Your Online Privacy Protection with EFF’s Panopticlick

“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched new online tracker-testing in its Panopticlick tool today, helping you analyze the privacy protections in your Web browser. When you visit a website, online trackers and the site itself may be able to identify you, and the records of your online activity can then be distributed among a vast… Continue Reading

EU General Data Protection Regulation

REGULATION (EU) No XXX/2016 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (General Data Protection Regulation) – December 2015. 204 pages – PDF – [snipped] “In order to ensure a consistent and high level… Continue Reading