Tag Archives: privacy

Interview with Elias Aboujaoude MD, author of ‘Virtually You’

Virtually You‘ is the book I reviewed some time back. It talks about the dangerous effects life online can have on our personalities and lives. I managed to get hold of the author of the book, Elias Aboujaoude MD, for a quick email interview. I approached him with the thought that perhaps he could offer some thinking points for…

The How-I-met-your-MOM-Project

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New Media Studies is a programme that is constantly changing, evolving and thus outdated on an annual basis. Its theoretical base is a solid one, its pragmatic learnings are however determined by the hegemonic character of the relation between man, machine and the technology that mediates meaning to both facets. The How-I-met-your-MOM-Projectgroup was grateful to contribute to give

App Review: PhoneGuard. Keeping Parents and Beliebers Happy

Designed with the noble purpose of preventing deadly traffic accidents caused by the distraction of texting while driving, the Phone Guard – Drive Safe application is in fact one new media watchtower for parents and employers to servile teenagers and employees.

This summer, Justin Bieber set out to be the saviour of teenage drivers everywhere by endorsing together with…

‘Consider it a safety Tool.’ – App Review: Glympse

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Glympse is a groundbreaking new way to share your location with anyone for a specified period of time using patent-pending GlymseWatch timer.

This app enables you to immediately share your location with friends and allows them to track your movement for a chosen amount of time.

It is supposed to be ‘Groundbreaking’ for several reasons:

First of…

You ‘like’, you pay! – Do Social Network Services Users Consciously and Willingly Give Up Their Right for Privacy?

Facebook faces more and more scrutiny over its user privacy issues, but do people willingly trade privacy as a commodity for using Social Network Services (SNSs)? Would they prefer to pay a certain fee in order to prevent surveillance activities and data mining processes, if they had this opportunity?

There have been extensive debates over the new Facebook features announced…

Social Media: My concerns and why I quit Facebook

When I was just a little boy, there wasn’t yet a personal computer. Although we had a game computer (a Commodor 64), my brothers and I preferred to play with LEGO or Playmobile and we went very often outside playing with other kids living in our neighborhood on the streets.
But then, when I was about 8 years old…

Children’s Online Privacy

Internet to me is a medium of convenience. The awkward feeling of being confined, limited, almost physically paralyzed, creeps on to me after being disconnected from the virtual dimension of the world wide web for more than one day. This physical response to an absence of access to a virtual space can be labeled “worrying,” and can…

Book Review: The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) by Siva Vaidhyanathan

I’m a so-called Google poweruser. Not only do I use the world’s biggest search engine for my daily queries like millions of ‘normal’ mortals do, I also use Google for my pictures (Picasa), my agenda (Google Agenda), video’s (YouTube), documents (Google Docs) and, most importantly: my e-mail (Gmail). So when a book comes along entitled: The Googlization of Everything (And

Book review: Check in / check uit – Christian van ‘t Hof, Rinie van Est, Floortje Daemen

Check in / Check uit

PICNIC: Life in Readable Cities

Using public transport, we leave digital traces when checking in and out with our OV chip cards. Once our Bonus Card at Albert Heijn got scanned over the counter, we provide Albert with valuable information about what we like to buy and how often we do so. Even when getting our morning Cappuccino at Starbucks and using a discount coupon on our mobile phone, it’s all about moving data from one spot to another. In other words: we live in data-rich environments and our cities are gradually turning into ‘readable cities’. All that, based on the vast amounts of data which we ourselves perpetually produce.