Tag: privacy
Get FISA Right turns 18
Thanks to everybody who's been involved over the years!
Strangers and Intimates
The fascinating story of how private life was won, and how it might just as easily be lost... Private life is in mortal danger, following decades in which it has been relinquished and ransacked. It is threatened by a three-headed state and corporate surveillance, a confessional, 'tell-all' culture that makes people complicit in the invasion of their own privacy, and the intense politicization of private life. Tiffany Jenkins's groundbreaking book traces the emergence of private sanctuaries from authority and public opinion to show that private life is a very recent – and hard-won – achievement. It also warns that, if we're not careful, it will be a temporary one. Strangers and Intimates is animated by dramatic human from the political struggles in the seventeenth century that led to Edmund Coke's rallying cry that 'an Englishman's home is his castle'; to the first modern privacy panic in 1844, when the British government opened private letters sent to the exiled Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini; and from the embrace by the public of reality TV to the Chinese government's social credit system. A private life is a precious, sustaining resource that is of profound intrinsic value, and it must be defended. We won't know what we have lost until it has gone...
What next on FISA Section 702? Good question!
Once things do pick up, they're likely to start moving quickly. So ... stay tuned!
Make your Gmail more private
Proton, the Swiss encrypted and privacy-aware email service, now lets you read and reply to your Gmail emails from within Proton. If you're looking to wean yourself off Gmail, or just curious about trying an alternative, this could be a good place to start: anyone you reply to will still receive your messages as Gmail,...
Owning My Corner of the Internet: Self-Hosting Decentralized Social Media
Social Sync v0.5.0 — Identity & Consent
Rebranding to Social Sync, implementing a granular consent system, and moving to AT Protocol OAuth.
Fighting back against techno-capitalist-authoritarianism
Lately I feel like the world's slow burn has been set to broil. Things are not good. And often times, I feel kind of hopeless, like we are going to have no choice but to succumb to authoritarianism and our new tech overlords. Sometimes it feels utterly impossible to do anything to shift the tide of doom. And that's the point. The people in control want us to feel hopeless, they want us to feel a sense of existential nihilism so that we don't fight back because we think it's useless to do so. Com...
California's Age Assurance Lacuna
California's Digital Age Assurance Act presents new headaches and concerns for operating system maintainers and app developers. But is it the catastrophe some claim?
App selection criteria
The last app I bought through Apple's app store was a client for my Audiobookshelf instance and this reminded me why I'd built a Navidrome client . I wanted to use the web application as a PWA, but Apple doesn't support continuous audio playback in PWAs or Safari on iOS. Audio plays, but it never advances to the next track.
A Flock of prying eyes
The city of Camarillo (where I live) is planning to install 15 new Flock ALPR cameras , bringing the city's total installed base up to 20. The city is adding to a surveillance network that has already been abused and misused by agencies across the country.
CAPTCHAs and the punishment of privacy-conscious users
I've been using an adblocker of some sort or another for roughly as long as I've been using the internet. It's become a necessary security measure and a necessary part of protecting your attention online. I also pay for and frequently use a VPN. Privacy should factor in to every decision you make online.
Über faires parken, Datenschutz und Google Maps Rezensionen
In diesem Blogbeitrag wird das Geschäftsmodell der Fair Parken GmbH untersucht, die private Parkplätze überwacht und Vertragsstrafen für Parkverstöße verhängt. Der Autor beleuchtet die Arbeitsbedingungen der Parkraumüberwacher und wirft Fragen zum Datenschutz auf, insbesondere im Hinblick auf den Ei
Das it gut. Das lad ich hoch.
In diesem Beitrag geht es um die Gestaltung und Funktionalität von Cookie-Bannern auf Webseiten. Der Autor kritisiert die oft unübersichtliche und unverständliche Gestaltung dieser Banner, die Nutzer dazu verleiten sollen, alle Cookies zu akzeptieren. Er hebt hervor, dass viele dieser Banner nicht ü
Awesome adblockers
Adverting sucks. It's insidious, pervasive and outright malicious. So, block ads.
Removing your house from street view
I've been on an adventure removing photos of our house from the internet. Street view, realty sites, whatever else I can find. I know what our house looks like, I know the address and only folks we share that information with actually need it.
Delete your account
Much, if not all, of the modern web is built on or has elements of user surveillance. It's ubiquitous. Use an ad-blocker absolutely everywhere. Pay for what you use. Minimize what you use. Delete your account.
Curate your own newspaper with RSS
"In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder." Molly White has been using RSS for over a decade and would like you to join her...
Delta’s AI-based price-gouging
"It's a scam. AI agents aren't going to replace human labor. The only way we'll replace human labor with software agents is by redesigning all these heterogeneous, competing systems owned by people who benefit from the status quo and have every motivation to obstruct this project. Good luck with that." Cory Doctorow reviews the ways...
Recommended email providers
I'm reasonably confident I've tried every privacy-friendly email provider out there. I prefer some over others and haven't run into any significant issues with any of them.
Using Signal to communicate securely
Now more than ever it's important to keep your communications with those you know secure and private. Signal is the best available option for doing so. It is secure, private and run by a non-profit organization that makes it freely available.
Meredith Whittaker on Privacy and Signal at SXSW
GPT Cloud Cover
RedNote migration
Data-Driven Deception
A story directly exposing how automakers were selling consumer driving data that ended up in the hands of insurers made a true ripple that drivers will benefit from in the years to come.
Experian Plans To Sell More Of Your Data
Experian is expanding data sharing with affiliates and non-affiliates starting February 5, 2025. Here is what is changing and how to opt out.
Uncovering A Google Workspace Email From An Alias
How a Google Workspace alias on any domain can leak the underlying primary Google account address, weakening alias-based privacy assumptions.
From Canada with Money - Watch Out for the Old-School Mail Scam
Anatomy of an old-school postal mail scam from Canada that uses USPS Informed Delivery, fake checks, and follow-up domains to defraud recipients.
Deceiving Authenticator Apps On Apple And Google Devices
App Store and Play Store ads routinely surface look-alike authenticator apps above the legitimate ones. Here is how to spot and avoid them.
Email Aliases Are Not A Security Measure
Why using email aliases as a substitute for strong passwords and MFA misunderstands the threat model and provides no real account security.
Data ownership and layer fungibility
The Beauty Of Having A Pi-hole
Why Pi-hole, the Raspberry Pi DNS sinkhole, is worth running at home to block trackers, ads, and analytics endpoints across every device on the network.
Libra, Facebook, and greed blindness
Delete your Slack workspace
Slack updated their terms of service, announcing plans to train AI/ML models on customer datas which is, frankly, super gross.
Adventures in self-hosting data
I think my self-hosted scrobbling implementation is, at this point, fairly stable. The charts I'm calculating track pretty closely with last.fm's and I'm inclined to chalk the difference up to how we're calculating/slicing dates.
Adblocker required
You open your browser, you go to check sports scores. The page shifts down to show you an ad, you click to close it and open the page by accident. You close the tab, you close the ad, you scroll down and you see sponsored content from a gambling partner.
Data ownership and agency
I've been shuffling more of the data I display and present on my site around recently and I've been thinking about the agency or lack thereof associated with that data.
Data collection should always be opt in
If you're offering a service online, you should only collect data from users that is strictly required to operate service. I don't care what you're building.
I'm going to keep opting out
Marketing, solicitations, advertising, political contact, direct mailers, email campaigns, cookies, ads — it's all opt out. It puts the burden on you to opt out of each communication each message, each outreach from a loyalty program. It can feel like weeding a garden, but that garden is your attention. The weeds keep returning, insisting upon their removal. One after another.