The Electronic World : (

[dieseltaylor]

I was looking at an advert for a camera that claims to be able to automate the uploading of pictures to multiple sites and name people. This is getting kind of scary as anyone who has seen Catfish will realise how identy theft seems to be easier and privacy harder.

And people may unwittingly always be sending pictures of people onto the Web when they set up these easy systems.

Just press to impress Only ***** Digital Cameras allow you to simultaneously share to multiple social networks and e-mail[1]

• Just press Share when in review mode
  
• Choose your favorite sharing destinations: FACEBOOK, e-mail, KODAK Gallery, FLICKR, YouTube, TWITTER, ORKUT, YANDEX, KAIXIN001, and KODAK PULSE Digital Frames[2][3]
  
• Connect your camera to your computer or insert your memory card and your videos or pictures are automatically uploaded to you sharing destinations

*****’s Share button:

• Works with your camera’s built-in **** Share Button App software
  
• Automatically shares when you connect to your computer[4]
  
• Tags to the largest number of social networks
  
• Uploads your images to FACEBOOK with your friends already tagged

Save time, upload friend tags to FACEBOOK

Upload your images to FACEBOOK with your friends already tagged via the **** Share Button App and the Face Recognition feature.

Face Recognition:

• Automatically saves up to 20 people tags
  
• Instantly recognizes up to five faces in a single image
  
• Makes finding and tagging friends easy

Moreover the control of what is purportedly free information seems to be suffering as shown in the examples below. I do not know much about the rights and wrongs but it does irk me greatly that riots in many countries are freely available but when its Wall St. it seems somehow entirely unsuitable for UK residents to view.

Is it that Wall St. is actually a recognisably greater danger than Syria or Dubai to the common man and therefore needs protection ? It would seem so.

Yahoo : Emails relating to the OccupyWallSt.org protest were blocked with the following message (emphasis added):

• Your message was not sentSuspicious activity has been detected on your account. To protect your account and our users, your message has not been sent.
  If this error continues, please contact Yahoo! Customer Care for further help.
  We apologize for the inconvenience.
  

Yahoo's customer care Twitter account acknowledges blocking the emails, but says it was an unintentional error:

• "We apologize 4 blocking 'occupywallst.org' It was not intentional & caught by our spam filters. It is resolved, but may be a residual delay."

Troy Davis and the Twitter Black Out Conspiracy(Single Black Male) - As a blogger, a number of people contacted me throughout the day on Tuesday, September 20th with the theory that "Troy Davis" and related topics were being censored on Twitter. I also received an email that day from Courtney Rose-Harris of the NAACP New Media Department in Washington D.C. She asked that I share the story of Troy Davis with my network. The subject line of her email included the hashtag "#TooMuchDoubt."

A casual observation of current Twitter trends at the time saw no mention of #TooMuchDoubt or another popular and obvious hashtag, #TroyDavis. Despite the fact that the story was being covered by national news organizations across the country.

Twitter admits editing offensive Trending Topics, plans more

Today Twitter's CEO said they may in the future "edit out any...clearly offensive [trending topics]." He also said "we edit out any [trending topics] with obscenities." Thanks to @rachelsklar for finding this tweet and @AbigailCollazo for pointing it out.

Government Orders You Tube To Censor Protest Videos(The Intel Hub) May 24, 2011 – When viewers in the UK attempt to watch videos of the protest, they are met with the message, “This content is not available in your country due to a government removal request. ”

We then click through to learn that, “YouTube occasionally receives requests from governments around the world to remove content from our site, and as a result, YouTube may block specific content in order to comply with local laws in certain countries.”

You can also search by country to discover that Google, the owner of You Tube, has complied with the majority of requests from governments, particularly in the United States and the UK, not only to remove You Tube videos, but also specific web search terms and thousands of “data requests,” meaning demands for information that would reveal the true identity of a You Tube user. Google claims that the information sent to governments is “needed for legitimate criminal investigations,” but whether these “data requests” have been backed up by warrants is not divulged by the company.

“Between July 1 and Dec. 31 (2009), Google received 3,580 requests for user data from U.S. government agencies, slightly less than the 3,663 originating from Brazil,” reports PC World. “The United Kingdom and India sent more than 1,000 requests each, and smaller numbers originated from various other countries. The numbers are imperfect, because a single request could consist of multiple users' data or removal of multiple URLs.”

With regard to search terms, one struggles to understand how a specific combination of words in a Google search can be considered a violation of any law. This is about government and Google working hand in hand to manipulate search results in order to censor inconvenient information, something which Google now freely admits to doing.

You Tube’s behavior is more despicable than the Communist Chinese, who are at least open about theircensorship policies, whereas You Tube hides behind a blanket excuse and doesn’t even say what law has been broken.

Controversial content and free expression on the web, a refresher by Google

[Magpie_Oz]

I am on record as saying I like my privacy and secrets so I'll not be investing in "The Eye of Big Brother" any time soon.

[Wicky]

Apple's iPhoto software has had face recognition tagging for a couple of years but it's hit or miss

http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/iphoto-face-fail/