Ars Technica
Ars Technica
If you’re curious about why we need much stronger privacy laws in the US, this article is a good start. Thanks Senator Wyden for fighting the good fight.
privacy
Ars Technica
In a press release, the FTC said that "Ring deceived its customers by failing to restrict employees' and contractors' access to its customers' videos, using customer videos to train algorithms, among other purposes, without consent, and failing to implement security safeguards." In one case, an employee "viewed thousands of video recordings belonging to female users of Ring cameras that surveilled intimate spaces in their homes such as their bathrooms or bedrooms," the FTC said.This is awful and why I try not to buy surveillance devices. It’s difficult not to send data out of your house but I hope not being connected to the Internet becomes a selling point for electronics eventually.
Business Insider
Business InsiderA controversial facial recognition database, used by police departments across the nation, was built in part with 30 billion photos the company scraped from Facebook and other social media users without their permission, the company's CEO recently admitted, creating what critics called a "perpetual police line-up," even for people who haven't done anything wrong.Posting to social media was supposed to be harmless.
STAT
STAT"During testing, with every response — such as clicking a button to indicate feeling depressed “more than half the days” over the last two weeks — a pixel sent Facebook the text of the answer button, the specific URL the user was visiting when clicking the button, and the user's hashed name, email address, phone number."The targeted advertising industry has set up some ridiculous incentives for people to behave horribly toward other people.
contrachrome.com
contrachrome.comExcellent parody of Scott McCloud’s 2008 comic about the wonders of Google Chrome. This is about the danger Chrome poses to our privacy. (And I’m obligated to say modern Firefox is a good alternative.)
CNN
CNNiOS users must now give explicit permission for apps to track their behavior and sell their personal data, such as age, location, spending habits and health information, to advertisers. While many apps have allowed people to manage or opt-out of this for years, it's typically buried deep in user settings and wordy privacy policies.Nice.
Open Web Analytics
A couple weeks ago I read Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast and it was the straw that broke the steady drumbeat camel of not using Google Analytics on this site's back.
I looked around at alternatives and settled on Open Web Analytics. It runs locally without a complex install and you can add custom events. The interface isn't as slick as Google Analytics but since I can query the data directly I should be able to write my own report pages.
The main thing is that it's one (admittedly tiny) meal that Google doesn't get to eat. And this site is one less place that Google knows you visited. Sneaky! (If you weren't blocking GA already, which you should.)
I looked around at alternatives and settled on Open Web Analytics. It runs locally without a complex install and you can add custom events. The interface isn't as slick as Google Analytics but since I can query the data directly I should be able to write my own report pages.
The main thing is that it's one (admittedly tiny) meal that Google doesn't get to eat. And this site is one less place that Google knows you visited. Sneaky! (If you weren't blocking GA already, which you should.)
conradakunga.com
conradakunga.com"So today I set out to actually see what it is one agrees to when they accept all."Peeling back the layers on those cookie agreement dialogs helps us learn about how web advertising works (and how massive the industry is).
Apple
AppleA number of leading public health authorities, universities, and NGOs around the world have been doing important work to develop opt-in contact tracing technology. To further this cause, Apple and Google will be launching a comprehensive solution that includes application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technology to assist in enabling contact tracing.I'm extremely concerned about privacy related to these companies and I also think this is a great development. We're going to need to trade some privacy for safety to get society going again. Kottke had a neat comic explainer about how contact tracing works: How Privacy-Friendly Contact Tracing Can Help Stop the Spread of Covid-19.
The Mozilla Blog
The Mozilla Blog"Today, Firefox is enabling encrypted DNS over HTTPS by default in the US..."So strange to see a tech company put energy into consumer privacy but I’ll take it.
github.com
github.comI keep trying to switch to Firefox because it's not managed by an advertising company. It has been hard breaking the Chrome habit. But this browser theme for Firefox makes it look exactly like Chrome. I wasn't happy with the compact design for tabs and the bookmarks bar in Firefox. Now I have no excuse. I will switch.
Update: A trick that has helped me remember I want to switch is setting my Chrome homepage to the Firefox download page.
Update: A trick that has helped me remember I want to switch is setting my Chrome homepage to the Firefox download page.
nytimes.com
nytimes.comHere's another must-read article even for chronic sufferers of tech-culture outrage fatigue—sorry.
"At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for."If you don't have or want a NYT subscribtion, The Verge has a good summary: Go read this NYT expose on a creepy new facial recognition database used by US police. (Interesting that a Facebook board member is funding a company that is seemingly breaking the Facebook terms of service?) Another must-read, Bruce Schneier's take on banning facial recognition: We’re Banning Facial Recognition. We’re Missing the Point.
"A ban on facial recognition won’t make any difference if, in response, surveillance systems switch to identifying people by smartphone MAC addresses. The problem is that we are being identified without our knowledge or consent, and society needs rules about when that is permissible."ps. (1/21) Vox has a great explainer video: What facial recognition steals from us.