Author: Chris
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Congress Isn’t Priceless!
The financial services industry pumps a huge amount of money into politics. So much so that the industry has special status and gets pretty much what it wants. Things are a bit different now, because the downturn in the economy and mortgage screwup has given Washington some leverage to examine some of the industry’s worse…
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Wifi Woo Strikes in Sebastopol
By way of AP and BoingBoing, one can find this post by Dale Daugherty on O’Reilly Radar about the newest attack of the tinfoil-hat-wifi-radiation brigade: Our town, Sebastopol, had passed a resolution in November to permit a local Internet provider to provide public wireless access. This week, fourteen people showed up at a City Council…
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Measuring Identity Theft at Top Banks (Version 1.0)
I’ve been AWOL from Denialism Blog because one of my UC-Berkeley projects has become all-consuming. I’m interested in sparking a market for identity theft protection. A real one. One where consumers can actually make choices among banks based on their actual ability to address security attacks. Last year, I published Identity Theft: Making the Unknown…
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Why Privacy Is What It Is…
The Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe have just released their annual Most Trusted Companies for Privacy report. As part of this report, the groups asked consumers about the factors–positive and negative–that shaped their perceptions of companies’ privacy practices. (Full disclosure: I am a fellow of the Ponemon Institute.) Bar Charts 3 and 4 in the Ponemon/TRUSTe…
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Can One Live Anonymously?
I’ve spent the last few months working with an excellent journalist on the Anonymity Experiment, which will appear in this month’s Popular Science magazine. In it, Catherine Price attempts to live a normal life without revealing personal data: …when this magazine suggested I try my own privacy experiment, I eagerly agreed. We decided that I…
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Save Katie!
Today, I joined about 100 hooligans in the anti-scientology protest in San Francisco, as part of Project Chanology, a large-scale effort to call attention to abuses committed by the cult of Scientology. Many protestors had serious signs that called attention to the various ways in which Scientology censors speech and defrauds people. But after watching…
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The Dog Ate My Ballot, or, Why Obama May Not Deliver
Obama has created a lot of excitement among young people. On Tuesday, young people waiving Obama signs were all over the Berkeley campus and downtown San Francisco. Hillary’s supporters were rarely seen, it seemed. You’ll note that I didn’t call these supporters “young voters.” Why? Because young people don’t vote. What’s my evidence of this…
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Mormons Troubled By Spotlight
Suzanne Sataline reports in today’s Journal about the intense spotlight that has been focused on the Mormon church as a result of the Romney campaign. The criticism has been so intense that the church has hired a public relations firm to battle it, and has encouraged young Mormons to blog about their religion. Perhaps what’s…
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The Direct Marketing Association’s New Math
I came across this statistic the other day while doing some research on marketing fraud: In recent years, despite the creation of a national “do not call” registry, the legitimate telemarketing industry has grown, according to the Direct Marketing Association. Callers pitching insurance plans, subscriptions and precooked meals collected more than $177 billion in 2006,…