Tag Archives: surveillance

Is your boyfriend cheating on you? There’s an app for that too

Wouter Timmermans | 03 November 2011, 3:15 pm | 3 comments | tags: , , ,

With new smart phones and GPS tracking, it’s possible to find and locate the position of other smart phones and the human body that goes with it. But is this legal? Does privacy still exist? Japanese women apparently don’t care about privacy; they just want to know why their boyfriend is late for dinner for the fourth time…

App Review: PhoneGuard. Keeping Parents and Beliebers Happy

Andrei Florian | 11 October 2011, 11:59 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , ,

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…

The Switch: from Matthew Fuller to mobile apps

Kendall Grady | 10 October 2011, 7:00 am | 1 comment | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Erupting Irruption

Ask Elk Grove, launched ten days ago for the city of Elk Grove, California, numbers among the newest localized smartphone applications for reporting civic repairs. Most follow agendas similar to GRCity311, an app developed for Grand Rapids, Michigan:

“GRCity311 makes it possible for anyone with an iPhone or Android Smartphone

…

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

Andrei Florian | 08 October 2011, 10:23 am | tags: , , , , ,

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…

Book Review: opaque presence: manual of latent invisibilities ed. Andreas Broeckmann and knowbotic research

Kendall Grady | 25 September 2011, 3:33 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

opaque presence instructs toward a mythology of suspended origin. Such a creation myth is necessarily one of destruction. Fully actualized, opaque presence could deposit the naked and the clothed in the Garden of Eden as a garden, an unbroken sanctuary, not a place, but a nothingness. However, the world turns more like a city. opaque…

Book Review : Vu a la web-cam (essai sur la web-intimité) by Nicolas Thély

Clément Adam | 18 September 2011, 11:09 am | 1 comment | tags: , ,

Nicolas Thély published in 2002 his PhD thesis on web intimacy. As he started doing research on webcams, Nicolas Thély was surprised to find so few (if any) specialized literature on the subject of webcams.

The book presents and analyses websites where couples broadcast a webcam image/stream to the World Wide Web.

Nicolas analyses different…

‘Headdesking’ and Beyond: The British Uprisings

Jamie Franklin | 12 September 2011, 8:34 pm | 2 comments | tags: , , , ,

‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’ (Barlow, 1996)

David Cameron’s reaction to the…

The Internet Is Taking My Pictures

Pim van Bree | 06 June 2011, 3:57 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , ,

Unlike Google Maps, Russia’s Yandex Карты is much more tourist friendly in that it does not blur your face away when you have been caught on camera! Yandex does not seem to uphold an evenly strict privacy policy as Google is imposed to do. A big help, as it assists me in taking touristic…

The Invention of the Century: Privacy

Fenneke Mink | 27 October 2010, 9:40 pm | 2 comments | tags: , ,

Privacy is considered to be an important issue for it is not just a social structure within a community, which can be regulated by social control anymore. It has developed to a dialectic notion of widespread surveillance activities within modern society. The notion of privacy that seems so important to us is a concept invented in the 19yh century, within…

Twart: Twitter and art

Cendy Calis | 11 October 2010, 3:30 am | tags: , , , ,

Twitter offers many interesting opportunities for interactive artists. While in many projects and installations participation by interacters needs to be requested, Twitter acts as an enormous database of the human psyche that artists can rely on for their work. Some say Twitter is the perfect recording system for capturing our zeitgeist, others disagree. Fact is, what we tweet says a lot about…