Daily Archives: 08-07-10

Google: ‘Privacy? Depends–where are you?’

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under government, international, law, privacy

A gaggle of campaigners (NAI, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Michael Zimmer, etc) push Google to add a link to its privacy policy on its home page, and Google’s refusal sparks snark: for example, “Larry Page, the company’s co-founder, didn’t want a privacy link ‘on that beautiful clean home page,’ said one executive at a Google competitor” (NYT), or “Does Anyone Really Care Where Google Places Its Privacy Policy?” (Techdirt). Google relents, publishes self-congratulatory note on public policy weblog (hardly a surprise). Funny, that: Page didn’t seem to mind the complete redesign of Google‘s Japanese page back in March. (The new design now includes a link to a privacy page).

Lesson: in key respects, Google isn’t monolithic. In fact, a quick survey of “European” Google sites (adapted from some random list of country-code TLDs) turns up interesting data:

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Nudge, nudge

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under economics

Simon Jenkins:

I was always uncomfortable at the overselling of economics as a science, when it is rather a branch of psychology, a study of the peculiarities of human nature. Its spurious objectivity, manifest in its ridiculous love affair with maths, induced a “Jupiter complex”, a conviction that scientific certainty applied with enough rigour to any problem triumphs over all.

(RBC)

Urban Versioning System 1.0

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under architecture, design, law, standards, urban

Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque, with illustrations by David Cuesta:

This document proposes that another lesson can be learned for architecture from computing: the way in which software is made. Here, we want to concentrate on the current most significant mode of software development—Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS)—steering clear of ubicomp fantasies that may often obfuscate technological power structures.

Includes:

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The Map is almost the terrain

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under design, environment, international

For now, enjoy the first world map with constant-scale natural boundary”:

Chuck Clark writes:

The art historian Erwin Panofsky, in his book Albrecht Durer, called this “prototopology,” which means merely that the map, when properly folded, resembles the object.

(Strange Maps)