IARPA’s five-year plan aims to design experiments that can measure trust with high certainty — a tricky proposition for a psychological study. Developing such experimental protocols could prove very useful for assessing levels of trust within one-on-one talks, or even during group interactions.

A second part of the IARPA proposal might involve using new types of sensors and software to gauge human facial, language or body signals that might help predict trustworthiness. Perhaps facial recognition technology that could deduce emotions or facial tics might help, not to mention better lie detectors.

IARPA is the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the U.S. intelligence community’s answer to DARPA.

There is a debate about how or if parents should use spyware on their kids’ computer to find out what their kids are doing online. This is a debate between parents, but is not a legal debate. Apparently a high school in Philadelphia took this idea to another level.

A Pennsylvania school district is being investigated by the FBI for remotely activating the web cams on the laptops they issued to students. The school district says that they were wanting to track online behavior when the students were supposed to be doing homework. The parents of these students disagree, saying it was a clear privacy violation. It is still unknown how the FBI will find, but I would not at all be surprised to find this a question posed to either the state’s or the U.S. Supreme Court.

What do you think? Privacy violation or good intentions communicated poorly?

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Since they are hard to conceal, the study says, noses would work well for identification in covert surveillance.

The researchers say noses have been overlooked in the growing field of biometrics, studies into ways of identifying distinguishing traits in people.

“Noses are prominent facial features and yet their use as a biometric has been largely unexplored,” said the University of Bath’s Dr Adrian Evans.

“Ears have been looked at in detail, eyes have been looked at in terms of iris recognition but the nose has been neglected.”

The researchers used a system called PhotoFace, developed by researchers at the University of the West of England, Bristol and Imperial College, London, for the 3D scans.

Those faced with the problem of how to verify a person’s identity would be well advised to ask themselves the question, ‘Identity with what?’ An enquirer equipped with the answer to this question is in a position to tackle, on a rational basis, the task of deciding what evidence will be useful for the purpose. Without the answer to the question, the verification of identity becomes a sadly familiar exercise in blind compliance with arbitrary rules.

I don’t think this is really a case about ISP liability at all. It is a case about the use of a person’s image, without their consent, that generates commercial value for someone else. That is the essence of the Italian law at issue in this case. It is also how the right of privacy was first established in the United States.

The video at the center of this case was very popular in Italy and drove lots of users to the Google Video site. This boosted advertising and support for other Google services. As a consequence, Google actually had an incentive not to respond to the many requests it received before it actually took down the video.

Back in the U.S., here is the relevant history: after Brandeis and Warren published their famous article on the right to privacy in 1890, state courts struggled with its application. In a New York state case in 1902, a court rejected the newly proposed right. In a second case, a Georgia state court in 1905 endorsed it.

What is striking is that both cases involved the use of a person’s image without their consent. In New York, it was a young girl, whose image was drawn and placed on an oatmeal box for advertising purposes. In Georgia, a man’s image was placed in a newspaper, without his consent, to sell insurance.

Also important is the fact that the New York judge who rejected the privacy claim, suggested that the state assembly could simple pass a law to create the right. The New York legislature did exactly that and in 1903 New York enacted the first privacy law in the United States to protect a person’s “name or likeness” for commercial use.

The whole thing is worth reading.