Written on May 4, 2008 – 1:29 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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It’s Sunday afternoon, why wouldn’t I cover another Twitter application? Especially since this one actually seems pretty useful. It’s called Bkkeepr and helps you to keep track of the books you read. Although statistics show that the number of people reading books is falling drastically, web professionals generally like to read a book or two. This blog even has a monthly Booklist 2.0 series by Martin Kloos.
Tracking the books you read has always been a popular activity. Amazon has some tools for it and Blippr partly revolves around updating your digital bookshelf. First of all, you probably like to show off a bit with your amazing list of classical masterpieces. Moreover, your book collection says something about you.
So it’s good news that somebody has created a simple way of tracking the books you’ve read. For now, it’s in some sort of stealth beta but after a while, it’s just a matter of sending the ISBN number to @bkkeepr. Also, you can post status updates about the page number you’ve reached and ‘bookmark’ your favorite parts in the book. So long for dog ears…
Bkkeepr is a project of booktwo.org. A blog by James Bridle that exists to “report, catalogue, investigate, stimulate and debate the future of literature”.
Oh and for the showing off part? Bkkeepr offers a widget too…
Written on January 22, 2008 – 7:12 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Peter Scharr, Germany’s data protection commissioner, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of the various international search engines comply with EU privacy laws and whether these laws should be loosened or tightened. Based on a what he proposed during a hearing by the European parliament recently it looks like it will be a lot more restrictive than most search engines want it to be. Scharr said that when someone is identified by an IP address “it has to be regarded as personal data.”.
European Commission in Brussels
The implications for search engines such as Google and Microsoft are huge. Google always took the standpoint that an IP address simply identifies a computer and not a user. That may be technically correct but since most people own one computer and access the internet via their own connection they generally have the same IP address and can be identified pretty well. You can read an extensive article about the subject including feedback from Google, Microsoft and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) at Yahoo News.
We asked Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, online privacy expert, from law firm SOLV (who successfully defended KaZaA in court in 2002 in the Netherlands) to give us his opinion on the matter. He says “The question is what the consequences are of the EU’s approach. If an IP address is personal data, this means that every action online implicates that the data protection legislation is applicable. It will be impossible to enforce legislation with such a result. The better question to ask is whether your privacy is actually being invaded. The processing of data does not necessarily imply an invasion of privacy.”
It will be interesting to see what online services will do if their IP tracking practices become illegal in Europe. They could decide to have different policies for Europe than the rest of the world. But to do that they would have to track IP addresses first which is precisely the reason why they are tracking them now, they say.
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