The coming EU privacy regulation will end up remaking the world's web
Europe's General Data Protection Regulation kicks in this May, and it enforces a user-first, privacy-centric set of rules for the internet that is totally incompatible with the adtech industry and the...
View ArticleYour smart TV is trivial to hack and leaks your personal information like...
Consumer Reports dragged a bunch of its top-rated smart TVs back into its labs to re-evaluate them, this time checking them for hard-to-evaluate information security risks and defects, which are not...
View ArticlePoll: Facebook is the least trusted custodian of private information,...
A Reuters/Ipsos poll of 2,237 subjects found that the majority of Americans (59%) "do not trust Facebook to obey US privacy laws." US privacy laws are among the weakest in the developed world, the...
View ArticleZuckerberg: Facebook will not stop spying on Americans to comply with EU...
The imminent implementation of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been hailed as a victory for global privacy advocates; since the regulation severely limits the collection of data...
View ArticleYou can unscramble the hashes of humanity's 5 billion email addresses in ten...
Marketing companies frequently "anonymize" their dossiers on internet users using hashes of their email addresses -- rather than the email addresses themselves -- as identifiers in databases that are...
View ArticleFacebook vs regulation: we exist nowhere and everywhere, all at once
Where is Facebook located? Well, if you're the taxman, Facebook's global HQ is a tiny shed somewhere in Ireland, where Facebook can escape virtually all taxation; but on the other hand, if you're the...
View ArticleThe world is no longer willing to tolerate the plague of bullshit "agreements"
Mark Zuckerberg says it doesn't matter how creepy and terrible his company is, because you agreed to let him comprehensively fuck you over from asshole to appetite by clicking "I agree" to a tens of...
View ArticleThe GDPR might actually create an "attention economy"
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect this month and will completely overturn the way that businesses gather and circulate data about internet users. The...
View ArticleHere's why everyone in the world just emailed you a new privacy policy
The looming deadline for the EU General Data Protection Plan means that companies have a duty to be extremely clear about what data they're collecting on you and what they're doing with it, and give...
View ArticleGDPR: Don't forget to bring a towel!
As The Guide says, "A towel is just about the most massively useful thing any interstellar Hitchhiker can carry. Partly it has great practical value." But the true power of a towel is its role as a...
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Turning on the internet after GDPR day
Dolan Darker (YouTube) welcomes the world to the web of 2018. Because of #GDPR, USA Today decided to run a separate version of their website for EU users, which has all the tracking scripts and ads...
View ArticleTelegram: ever since Russia's blocking demand, Apple has prevented us from...
Last April, the Kremlin ordered a ban on the private messaging app Telegram, blocking millions of IP addresses that formed Amazon and Google's clouds in order to prevent users from accessing the...
View ArticleThe most interesting thing about the "Thanksgiving Effect" study is what it...
Late last year, a pair of economists released an interesting paper that used mobile location data to estimate the likelihood that political polarization had shortened family Thanksgiving dinners in...
View ArticleOn June 20, an EU committee will vote on an apocalyptically stupid,...
The European Union is updating its 2001 Copyright Directive, with a key committee vote coming up on June 20 or 21; on GDPR day, a rogue MEP jammed a mass censorship proposal into the draft that is...
View ArticleMark Zuckerberg and his empire of oily rags
Surveillance capitalism sucks: it improves the scattershot, low-performance success-rate of untargeted advertising (well below 1 percent) and doubles or triples it (to well below 1 percent!). But...
View ArticleBritish Airways won't let you check in while ad-blocking, insists that...
British Airways was outed by security researcher Mustafa Al-Bassam for telling passengers they couldn't help with delays and other problems unless they posted their personal information publicly to...
View ArticleApp for UK Conservative Party conference exposes all attendees' private info
The UK Conservative Party's annual conference is about to kick off in Birmingham, and the Tories have distributed an app ahead of time to all attendees: senior ministers, government officials, members...
View ArticleGDPR: Good for privacy, even better for Google's dominance
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation is a gnarly hairball of regulation; on the one hand, it makes it virtually impossible to collect mountains of data and buy/sell/trade/mine it to...
View ArticleEU Parliament demands Facebook audit after breach hits 87 million users
MEPs in European Parliament want Facebook to submit to a full audit by European Union bodies to determine whether the U.S. based social media company adequately protects users’ personal data. The...
View ArticleBritons! Tell the UK government that the compulsory porn-viewing logs need...
The British government has decreed that adult sites must collect age-verification data on everyone who looks at material rated for 18-and-over viewing; this amounts to a database of the porn-viewing...
View ArticleFacebook gave third party developers access to 6.8 million users' private photos
Facebook has notified 6.8 million users that, due to a bug, the company allowed its third-party developers to access all the users' photos, including those marked as private. Facebook says that the...
View Article"Owning your data" will not save you from data capitalism
The fight against surveillance capitalism and mass state surveillance has reached a tipping point, the peak-indifference moment, when new privacy advocates are self-radicalizing as they witness...
View ArticleHow Facebook tracks Android users, even those without Facebook accounts
Facebook provides a suite of turnkey app-building tools for Android that are widely used among the most popular Google Play apps, with billions of combined installs; naturally, these tools create...
View ArticleMobile apps built with Facebook's SDK secretly shovel mountains of personal...
If you need to build an app quickly and easily, you might decide to use Facebook's SDK, which has lots of bells and whistles, including easy integration of Facebook ads in your app's UI. The quid pro...
View ArticleFacebook hands hundreds of contractors in India access to its users' private...
Facebook gave "as many as" 260 contractors at Wipro, Ltd in Hyderabad, India access to users' private messages and private Instagram posts so that the contractors could label them prior to their...
View ArticleA deep dive into stalkerware's creepy marketing, illegal privacy invasions,...
Stalkerware -- spyware sold to people as a means of keeping tabs on their romantic partners, kids, employees, etc -- is a dumpster fire of terrible security (compounded by absentee management), sleazy...
View ArticleLike Amazon, Google sends voice assistant recordings to contractors for...
After Bloomberg revealed that Amazon secretly sent recordings from Alexa to subcontractors all over the world in order to improve its speech-recognition systems, a whistleblower leaked recordings from...
View ArticleA generalized method for re-identifying people in "anonymized" data-sets
"Anonymized data" is one of those holy grails, like "healthy ice-cream" or "selectively breakable crypto" -- if "anonymized data" is a thing, then companies can monetize their surveillance dossiers on...
View ArticleGermany's powerful IG Metall trade union is organizing Youtubers to force...
As Google has enacted a series of high-handed, opaque changes to how Youtube monetizes, upranks and censors videos, Youtubers have found themselves battered by the changes: they built Youtube into a...
View ArticleNew app helps you identify IoT devices around you, tells you what data they...
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have come up with this new IoT Assistant app (available for both iOS and Android) that will supposedly inform you about what Internet-connected smart devices are around...
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