I get strange looks from some of my friends and colleagues sometimes. On the one hand, I strongly advance the idea that people’s privacy should be protected, by default, and at the same time I blog, use social networking sites (though somewhat uncomfortably), own a cell phone, use credit cards, etc. This week I’ve ‘stepped things up’ by syndicating my del.icio.us bookmarks with my blog – you’ll now be treated (or spammed, I guess, depending on how you see things) with the articles that I’ve tagged in the past 24 hours that I think are interesting.

SPAM Ahoy!

I’ll start by stating this: I don’t think that the links you’ll be seeing are Spam. I think that I’m tagging good, solid, helpful links for people that might be interested in surveillance, privacy, and (typically) how either of those topics intersects with technology in some fashion. You’ll note that, for the next little while at least, you’ll see links to articles on Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and behavioral advertising. I expect some WiMAX stuff as well. There are a couple reasons why I’m syndicating this kind of content:

1. I think that it’s important, and posting links here increase the chances of people reading about these topics. More attention needs to be given to them.
2. I don’t get a chance to blog as often as I’d like, but I’m always finding stuff that other people might find interesting. While my short descriptors of links lacks the comprehensiveness of a blog post, it’s enough that might get people interested in these topics to articles they will find useful.
3. It will potentially increase my own page rank in Google’s analytics, increasing the chance that people can find this webspace by searching for privacy- and surveillance-related issues. (This is a fairly selfish reason, I admit, but since it’s my space, and attached to my name, selfish seems OK here *grin*)

Stop It, Stop It!

If all of the del.icio.us links are REALLY annoying you, let me know. Alternately, if there are particular links that you find interesting/want to know more about, let me know – there is a decent chance that I will have something more to say on the topic of any of the links beyond the 250 character limit that del.icio.us holds me to, and I may have links around that I haven’t tagged yet.

So…We Finally Learn Who Christopher Parsons Is

You might be thinking to yourself, “this seems particularly transparent for Chris. Given his focus on privacy, and that he at least claims to like personal privacy, what the hell is he doing releasing some information on his own click-stream?” This is a good question, but I’m not actually releasing the majority of what I’m searching – things that I don’t think are appropriate for the theme of this blog, or that is personal enough in nature that I don’t feel comfortable discussing it (here) won’t be added to the blog. Thus, I’m distinguishing between what I want you to see, and what I want to keep between myself, behavioral advertising groups, and my search engines.

This concludes today’s explanation of the click stream. Back to Google!