Yale Student Allows His Privacy To Be Obliterated For A Class Project Kashmir Hill Forbes 5/12/2011
Six Yale students needed a guinea pig for a class project. The guinea pig had to be willing to hand over access to his cellphone and to his Facebook and email accounts so that the students could figure out which of the three held the most revealing and intimate details about a person's life. Amazingly, they found a volunteer. And now the details of his life have been posted online for your perusal. The Yalies called it "The Gavin Project." They wanted to find out "which source of personal information reveals the most personal information." One nod to privacy: "Gavin" is not the Yale senior's real name. So what did they find out about him? His smartphone revealed he's well-connected, yielding some interesting contacts, including former New York governor Elliot Spitzer, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, blogger Matt Yglesias, and former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo. Given that social circle, I wasn't surprised when one of the students involved in the data scrape, Sebastian Park, told me Gavin has political ambitions. (So perhaps his fellow privacy-invading students were doing him a favor. Lots of politicians these days are paying "online reputation companies" to go through their digital dossiers to find potential landmines, reports Politico.) ... http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/05/12/yale-student-allows-his-privacy-to-be-obliterated-for-a-class-project/ _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
