Australian hip-hop artist and rapper 360 (Matt Colwell) caused an uproar earlier in the week when he said on Q&A that he identified the Australian flag and the Southern Cross with racism. 360 announced…
Social media should not be used by journalists to verify online identity.
Daniel Avauz/Flickr
Australians’ love of social media, which includes 11.3 million Facebook users, has been a haven for social networking companies, advertisers, and increasingly journalists. But Fairfax’s recent publication…
Few competitions pitch the whole of Europe against the United States. The Ryder Cup began formally in 1927 as a contest between Great Britain and the US. It was expanded to include first Ireland and then…
Palmer United Party Senator Jacqui Lambie is willing to take a DNA test to prove her Indigenous heritage – but would that do any good?
AAP Image/Lukas Coch
Palmer United Party Senator Jacqui Lambie recently created controversy by claiming in her first speech to Parliament that going back six generations, she is related to the renowned Tasmanian Aboriginal…
Cathy Freeman’s racial background is Chinese, English and Aboriginal.
AAP/ Dean Lewins
All too often the matter of Australian Aboriginal identity is decided superficially – by looking at a person’s face and general appearance. Colour is often the measure of Aboriginality, since the original…
A still from the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s award-winning Be Deadly Online campaign.
ACMAcybersmart/YouTube
Tony Abbott is spending this week in North-East Arnhem Land, part of his long-held hope “to be not just the Prime Minister but the Prime Minister for Aboriginal Affairs”. We asked our experts: what stories…
Women’s Liberation was a worldwide mobilisation that paved the way for powerful critiques of conventional thinking about gender, sexuality and identity.
Warren K. Leffler, 1970/Library of Congress
The past four decades have produced gains around the world for women and girls in literacy, formal education, life expectancy, workforce participation and access to some professions. We have also seen…
Passport officers had to decide if a person facing them was the same as the one pictured in the identity card. In this case, yes.
David White
Staff responsible for issuing passports are no better than the average person at identifying if someone is holding a fake passport photo, my colleagues and I report in a study published in PLOS ONE today…
What memories are you harbouring in your old handset?
Steve Rhodes
During the February half term break, I took my son to the Hayward gallery to see the new Martin Creed show. The highlight of the exhibition is a space in which 20 people are squeezed into a small room…
Will the Privacy Act protect you from being identified by your mobile phone address?
Santos "Grim Santo" Gonzalez/Flickr
What does privacy mean in an age of ongoing privacy breaches? With new privacy law coming online in Australia on March 12, our Privacy in Practice series explores the practical challenges facing Australian…
@N has spent months trying to get his username back from thieves.
Twitter
Joyriding – stealing a car just for the fun of it – is a signature act of troublemaking teenagers seeking excitement and a chance to show off their bravado. But while car theft is among the most common…
Your Facebook settings now stay put, even after you die.
rutty
Facebook’s Community Operations team has announced it is changing the privacy settings on accounts for deceased users to reflect the settings they chose in life. Before the new policy, Facebook automatically…
Men needn’t be at loggerheads over their identity.
Eoin Gardiner
Every generation declares some kind of crisis in masculinity. And women today aren’t shy of pronouncing a masculine emergency: Hannah Rosin did so in her book The End of Men while MP Diane Abbott warned…
Giving care leavers special access to their records might be one way to help them achieve justice, recognition and a firmer sense of belonging and community.
AAP/Dan Himbrechts
“You have the records of our abuse.” So read the placards held by protesters outside hearings of the Royal Commission and the recent Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child sex abuse. These protesters…
The Barmy Army, England’s loud travelling band of cricket supporters, may add colour to the Ashes series, but are they just rehearsing colonial stereotypes of Australia?
AAP/Tracey Nearmy
When Australian prime minister Julia Gillard was summarily dispatched in June by her parliamentary team, the British media were bemused. Hadn’t Australia weathered the global financial crisis with aplomb…
Much information is available to us just by focusing on a person’s face.
Dual Time Studio
You can tell a lot about a person just by looking at their face. From a glance, we can glean information about a person’s emotional state, sex, age, ethnicity, where their attention is focused and, of…
There is a more modern way to get your man.
BostonBill/Flickr
Police lineups have long been used in criminal investigations. We have all seen TV shows depicting a witness trying to identify a bad guy from an array of people in a lineup. But in some areas using photos…