Writing

“Hello Kettle? Yeah, hi, this is the Pot calling.”

Wired’s Ryan Singel reports on a spat between AT&T and Google regarding their privacy practices:

Online advertising networks — particularly Google’s — are more dangerous than the fledgling plans and dreams of ISPs to install eavesdropping equipment inside their internet pipes to serve tailored ads to their customers, AT&T says.

Even more fun than watching gorillas fight (you don’t have to pick a side—it’s guaranteed to be entertaining) is when they bring up accusations that are usually reserved for the security and privacy set (or borderline paranoids who write blogs that cover information and privacy). Or their argument boils down to “but we’re less naughty than you.” Ask any Mom about the effectiveness of that argument. AT&T writes:

Advertising-network operators such as Google have evolved beyond merely tracking consumer web surfing activity on sites for which they have a direct ad-serving relationship. They now have the ability to observe a user’s entire web browsing experience at a granular level, including all URLs visited, all searches, and actual page-views.

Deep Packet Inspection is an important sounding way to say that they’re just watching all your traffic. It’s quite literally the same as the post office opening all your letters and reading them, and in AT&T’s case, adding additional bulk mail (flyers, sweepstakes, and other junk) that seems appropriate to your interests based on what they find.

Are you excited yet?

Monday, August 18, 2008 | privacy  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.