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Dear Jennifer Stoddard: Quit Screwing Around

Jennifer Stoddard, Canada’s “Privacy Commissioner” (charged with protecting the public’s privacy) is apparently doing a “heck’uva job,” having identified Google Street View as potentially impinging on Canadian’s privacy, while in the meantime Industry Canada has convened a secret panel to overturn internet wiretapping laws:

“It is extremely disappointing to see that the departments continue to believe that ISPs should be required to hand over potentially sensitive personal information without a court order or other judicial oversight.”

“Public Safety Canada and Industry Canada have quietly launched a semi-public consultation on one element of lawful access. The new consultation, which concludes on September 25th, asks for comments on the provision of customer name and address information by telecommunications companies to law enforcement. The consultation has not been posted on the Internet and I was asked not to post it online.”

[from Michael Geist]

So - here’s an open, short letter to Jennifer Stoddard:

Dear Jennifer Stoddard,

Please do your job. Canada has an obligation to our citizens and history to provide for a future free from authoritarianism, persecution, and fear. Your office was in part tasked with protecting this future - acknowledging that “privacy” comes from the willing participation of the public body, private industry, and government.

Standing by while government departments willfully erode Canadian’s privacy without citizen or judicial oversight is not permissible. This was not what I voted for; this was not what anyone voted for.

Please do your job.

Regards,
–Rod

Well, super. Let’s see how quickly Jennifer Stoddard finds this article in either Technorati or Google Blogsearch, because I’m sure that as a good public servant, she has persistent searches set up in both to let her know when the Canadian blogosphere starts buzzing about an issue she’s supposed to be managing.

Oh wait. Government. Canada. Might as well have scrawled this on a notepad, crumpled it up, and thrown it in the trash. A bloody waste of time.

canada, jennifer stoddard, privacy wiretapping

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My Story: I was served by the Fair Housing Council for a Katrina Volunteer Housing site

Back when Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, I built a quick and dirty site at KatrinaHome.com to let people with space in their homes around the country take in refugees. It was actually pretty cool - it had printable pages designed to be posted on walls at shelters, WAP access, various privacy protection tools, and so on. Four months later, I was served with notice from the Fair Housing Council (of New Orleans). I am Canadian, which I’m not sure they realized at the time, so I didn’t know how to take it.

The problem was that in all of the thousands of listings the site received, some folks specified racial, gender, or demographic “preferences” in the free form comment field - along the lines of single mothers wanting families to host instead of single men. I took the site down, as months after the disaster traffic had dropped to zero anyway, and more importantly, I didn’t want to deal with legal troubles from an altruistic volunteer effort. As it turns out, because the comments of preference were in a free-form comment field, I would have been safe anyway under the DMCA “Safe Harbor” provision - a protection that Roommates.com will not enjoy, according to a ruling today.

Note also that Craigslist was sued as well - case dismissed.

The Fair Housing people are a good intentioned group seeking to stop predjudiced landlords from making unfair decisions. It sounds like they may have a case against Roommates.com who by not understanding the HUD provisions may have crossed a line by enabling discrimination. Think of it as the equivalent to a local newspaper having different classifieds sections for white people seeking white roomates, and so on - not a circumstance that would ever arise. “SWF” declarations in actual classified ads would be Safe Harbored as they are “user submitted” content.

Moral of the story: Know your business and regulatory/legal environment. Being a 2.0 startup doesn’t make you immune. Just because you can offer a feature doesn’t mean you should…

fairhousing, hud roommates

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BlinkX, Video Search, and the Corporate Shell Game

The Financial Times broke the news, but Mashable summed it up more succinctly: $20 and a free pony if you can figure this one out.

The demerger of the consumer business is a complex transaction, in which Autonomy will first take ownership of Blinkx, a separate company founded by Autonomy’s former US chief technology officer, Suranga Chandratillake, which already uses Autonomy’s consumer search technology. In exchange Blinkx will be given exclusive rights to the technology, everywhere outside China. Then the Blinkx business will be demerged again and floated. [From the FT article]

Sounds like an complicated way for Suranga Chandratillake to take a pay day while keeping shareholders happy. Or something.

Meanwhile, try using Blinkx. Personally, I found the search results from YouTube alone a lot better: less clutter in the results, more relevance.

BlinkX for “Nissan Skyline.”
YouTube for “Nissan Skyline.”

BlinkX results are full of a bunch of remote-controlled car stuff - not what I was looking for. Plus, the BlinkX interface, with preview videos playing unsolicited, video thumbnails, and so on, is distracting to the point of making the site painful to use - however technically impressive it may be. Say what you will about the aesthetics/usability of YouTube, but its better than BlinkX.

Finally, BlinkX doesn’t seem to be indexing YouTube properly either. The result sets from each don’t match, and I have no idea how BlinkX ranks video results from one site over another anyway. When it comes right down to it, BlinkX seems counter-intuitive, dis-organized, and a confusing way to find video. This is the fate I fear for CastTV.

blinkx, casttv, mashable, mergers, video youtube

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Boooo to Amazon - Suing Statsaholic: Amazon API/ECS Boycott time?

EDIT: HOW ABOUT MONDAY, APRIL 23rd FOR AN API ECS BOYCOTT? Post your thoughts in the comments. By “boycott” I mean if you use ECS to link to Amazon for affiliate sales, shut ‘er down and hit amazon in the wallet.

As a frequent user of the Amazon ECS API and follower of Amazon’s forays into platform-territory (S3, etc), I find it very disappointing to read about Amazon suing Statsaholic [Alexaholic] [via Mashable].

Mashable has the actual filing in their post, but the nub of it is that Statsaholic took Amazon’s open data and application platform and added value to it by offering an expanded feature set around Amazon’s offering, much like I did with the Flickr API and Google Maps on BlockRocker.com [flickr portion since removed], and much like many mashup artists have done thousands of times all over the net. I identified a gap in Flickr’s product offering and filled it, using their API. Flickr benefited, and so did I. When Flickr released their own geotagging product, I let the photo portion of BlockRocker die a slow death, eventually shuttered it, and that was that.

The same thing should have happened with Amazon and Statsaholic. Why Amazon feels the need to sue a niche business out of existence rather than thanking them for the adoption they’ve driven to this point and clobbering them with a superior product is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps the Amazon Mashup community should unite in solidarity against bullying of API-partners by having an Amazon shutdown day: I imagine if everyone using the Amazon API shuttered it for a day in protest, Amazon would feel some impact. I’ll Amazon links on UpcomingDiscs.com and HDDB.net - anyone else? What’s a good date?

alexa, alexaholic, amazon, blockrocker, boycott, flickr, mashable statsaholic

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