At a time when many Americans believe their personal information is less secure and are concerned with how companies and the government use their personal data, a substantial share of the public has opted out of using a product or service because of privacy concerns, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 3-17, …
How long would it take to read the Terms of Service Agreements of popular online services See the full infographic at VisualCapitalist
Since the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandate, marketers worldwide have reluctantly appended privacy consent mechanisms to their site user flow. The dark patterns they use show they have no viable alternative but to collect cookie data. Consumers respond by providing fake data, using ad blockers and other techniques. Escaping this vicious cycle requires …
Shane chats with former NSA spy and whistleblower Edward Snowden on the rise of authoritarianism during the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s all of this data being collected, how are the government so when in in South Korea, I get a text saying oh you met Joe Blow, he might be infected you should, you know sequester …
Continue reading “Shelter in Place with Shane Smith & Edward Snowden”
Surely, if offered a choice between suffering financial hardship and a temporary invasion of privacy and civil liberties, many people would opt for the latter. While some fiercely object to any threat to our privacy, the unremitting popularity of Facebook — even after the Cambridge Analytica scandal — suggests that most people are happy to …
Our everything-digital era has made it easier to preserve every last scrap of information about our lives, but eventually, many of us will have to face the question of who really controls our photo albums, letters, diaries, and other personal mementoes stored in the cloud or on password-protected hard drives. As it is, tech companies …
“Michele Loi is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Zurich. He argues that proponents of privacy should not put privacy above health – else risk sliding into irrelevance. [..] The second risk for privacy is paradoxical: it follows from having “too much respect” for privacy itself. If our concern with privacy prevents urgent political action …
In recent years both governments and corporations have been using ever more sophisticated technologies to track, monitor and manipulate people. Yet if we are not careful, the epidemic might nevertheless mark an important watershed in the history of surveillance. Not only because it might normalise the deployment of mass surveillance tools in countries that have …
Continue reading “Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus”
From a privacy perspective Microsoft Edge and Yandex are qualitatively different from the other browsers studied. Both send persistent identifiers that can be used to link requests (and associated IP address/location) to backend servers. Edge also sends the unique hardware identifier of the device to Microsoft, and Yandex similarly transmits a hashed hardware identifier to …
Continue reading “The Best and Worst Browsers for Privacy, Ranked”