This is an archived course. A more recent version may be available at ocw.mit.edu.

Personal Data Storage / Total Information Awareness

Topic Description

Learning how to scrape, or extract, their own or research subject's publicall available on-line data while reading about American government and military programs to do the same exposes students to the presence, technology, and history of data.

Readings

Starr, Amory. "Be the Media: Independent Media Centers." In Global Revolt: A Guide to the Movements against Globalization. London, UK: Zed Books, 2005. ISBN: 9781842774830.

Black, Edwin. IBM and the Holocaust : The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation. Morrisville, NC: Dialog Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780914153108.

Weitzner, Abelson, et al. "Information Accountability." Communications of the ACM 51, no. 6 (June 2008): 82-87.

Chang, Fay, et al. "Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data." Google, Inc., 1-14.

Ginsberg, Jeremy, et al. "Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using Search Engine Query Data." Nature 457 (February 19, 2009): 1012-1014.

Popp, Robert, Armor, and Thomas, et al. "Countering Terrorism Through Information Technology." Communications of the ACM 457, no. 3 (March 2004): 36-43.

Resources

Overview of the Information Awareness Office, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (Poindexter's 2002 remarks on the DARPA TIA project)

Programming with Punched Cards, Dale Fisk. (Dale Fisk on a programmer's perspective on first encountering punch cards (2005)) (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF - 1.6MB)

On Data Ownership in a Networked World

Google. "Google Health – Product Overview." August 19, 2009. YouTube. Accessed May 9, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNe6-p4G7Ik

History of Census Tabulation and Processing

Google Flu Trends

Electronic Privacy Information Center

Personal Data Ownership

Computing History by Frank da Cruz

"5 Ways You're Secretly Being Monitored"

Privacy and Data Ownership Do Not Apply

Identity Theft and the Licensing of Personal Information

A different solution for personal data

It's Not about Data Ownership