Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
How Shady Companies Guess Your Religion, Sexual Orientation, and Mental Health And sell that data to the highest bidder. Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate. Photo by ISerg/Getty Images Plus. Millions of Americans were using telehealth company and prescription drug provider GoodRx—yet probably didn’t know that it was sharing their prescription medications and health conditions with…
A lot of the—and I can’t believe I need to use this term, but there really is no other way to phrase it—critics of privacy have this tendency to see privacy only through the lens of ‘threat’. As the threat has built and they can’t reconcile their self-image with popular and consistent interest in privacy…
The subject of online anonymity came up at a house party a few weeks back. One of the people there—a friend I’d known for years—said he couldn’t get over the fact that a privacy reporter like me would use their full name on any social site. I told him that hiding behind an online…
The Standards Council of Canada has approved an IT-related standard which would eliminate new data silos and copies when organizations adopt or build new applications, thus apparently preventing any data copies being made with new applications. However, last-time integration could bring in legacy data via copies. The CAN/CIOSC 100-9, Data governance – Part 9: Zero-Copy…
from the “anonymized”-doesn’t-mean-anonymous dept We’ve noted for a very long while how most of the explanations that corporations use to insist that your privacy is protected are effectively worthless. For example, corporations will routinely inform you that it’s no big deal that they’re over-collecting and selling access to your browsing or location data to any…
Twitter’s direct messages have always been a security liability. The DMs you send to friends and internet strangers aren’t end-to-end encrypted, making your conversations potentially accessible if Twitter suffers a data breach, or to company staffers with the right permissions to access them. Both scenarios are arguably more likely in Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where key security and…
At the end of April, Apple’s introduction of App Tracking Transparency tools shook the advertising industry to its core. iPhone and iPad owners could now stop apps from tracking their behavior and using their data for personalized advertising. Since the new privacy controls launched, almost $10 billion has been wiped from the revenues of Snap,…
For the Tech Policy Press Sunday Show podcast, I spoke to author Carissa Véliz about her recently published book, Privacy is Power: Why And How you Should Take Back Control of Your Data. Carissa is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College, at the…
Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard’s podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet. Tech companies have repeatedly reassured the public that trackers used to follow smartphone users through apps are anonymous or at least pseudonymous, not directly identifying the person using the phone. But what they don’t mention is that an…
James Rosewell could see his company’s future was in jeopardy. It was January 2020, and Google had just announced key details of its plan to increase privacy in its Chrome browser by getting rid of third-party cookies and essentially breaking the tools that businesses use to track people across the web. That includes businesses like…