Every time I click “Accept” or “Agree” on one of those software end-user license agreements, I feel like a schnook. That’s Yiddish for a person who is gullible or easily cheated. (One Yiddish word generally outworks half a dozen English…
Tag: privacy
Peeing, Privacy and Politics
Since politicians have made bathrooms a trending topic, I have a confession: I’ve been urinating in public all my life. Or at least it feels that way. For those of us with penises (and birth certificates to prove it), exposing…
Privacy in the Age of Cellphones
Although the paranoid among us fear a long-running government conspiracy to track our every move à la Orwell’s 1984—and to be sure, technology now makes that possible—the path to having GPS in every pocket was more uncertain, less coordinated and…
GPS Turns 40
December 2013 brought two important anniversaries for GPS, a technology that has changed the world, yet both milestones have gone unnoticed in the media. The Pentagon authorized GPS development 40 years ago on Dec. 17, 1973. If GPS were a…
The Privacy of Rooftops
C-SPAN’s Washington Journal broadcast an excellent program on the “Domestic Use of Drones” coinciding with AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems 2013, a trade show in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. On display were the latest in…