Alex Reid

“Student warning!” Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales tweeted on Monday. “Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!”

The bad law is the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act and the backlash officially starts tomorrow. See here for more info.

Wikipedia’s decision to participate with a 24-hour blackout was a decision of the Wikipedia community, and intends to bring the lobby message to the masses.

News crowd sourcing site Reddit said they’ll go offline for 12 hours in protest, displaying a “simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit.”  Even Mozilla is planning to participate in the protest, replacing the content on its various sites with anti-SOPA messages.

Some called for Facebook and Google to join the blackout, saying their participation alone would kill the bill. Google has been a vocal opponent of SOPA/PIPA since the beginning. Google won’t blackout, but they will provide a link to some anti-SOPA information on its homepage.

Here’s the list of companies and organizations backing the bill.

It seems like an unlikely partnership. In fact, I’m not sure it’s actually a partnership per se. It seems that Netflix is tapping into RescueTime’s stats to find worthy candidates to come work for them.

This morning I received an email from RescueTime stating that not only is my productivity on the up and up, Netflix thinks I’m a “passive candidate” that might be interested in being either:

Senior UI Engineer – Customer Service Engineering
Senior Software Engineer – Cloud Solutions
Senior Software Engineer in Test – Cloud Solutions

I’m flattered, and while I did willingly sign up for a free service to log my own online activities, I am somewhat concerned that my productivity stats are being offered to third parties which happen to be prospective employers.

Canada’s Privacy Commissioner has just released the final report of her Office’s consultations on the subject of Online Tracking, Profiling and Targeting, and Cloud Computing.

Jennifer Stoddart said:

“Most people have no idea about the rich trail of data they leave behind when they browse the Internet, use social networking sites, or engage the geo-location functions of their mobile devices,” the Commissioner said.

Organizations that track the online activities of Canadians must be more upfront about their practices, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart has concluded… “it comes down to meaningful consent, which entails informed consent”.

Here is a great article differentiating between the terms “Open Data” and “Publicly available data” which should be addressed in the coming discussions about transparency.

(A)n increasing number of people are using the term open data to mean publicly available data … this “open data” initiative focuses on what data is made available, when open data is really about how data is made available.

The concept of “Open Data” is about format and protocol, and not the limits of any content. In light of the latest WikiLeaks drama, this part should be repeated:

Whether data should be made publicly available is where privacy concerns come into play. Once it has been determined that government data should be made public, then it should be done so in an open format.