Tag: privacy
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.
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.
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.
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.
Towards a quieter, friendlier web
I love the internet, I grew up on it and (probably) spend too much time on it. I found the music I love on it, I've made friends on it, I went to school for business but built a career on the web instead. I often have a hard time reconciling where the web is now with what it was like when I first dove into it.
Browsing the mobile web sucks
The mobile web isn't all bad, but so much of the experience is.
Embrace, extend, enshittify
Meta launched Threads and it'll support ActivityPub soon. You should federate with the app since, well, all your posts are accessible to them anyways should they make the effort to obtain them.
Domain names as discoverable personal identifiers for the web
What if — and hear me out here — instead of using email or a platform-owned account, we leveraged individual domain names as personal identifiers for the web?
I block ads
I block ads in the browser. I block ads at the DNS level.
A Safari-specific guide to making the modern web suck less
Take a second, turn off all of your browser extensions, go to a popular website that comes to mind and take a look at how bad the default experience is. Bonus points — pull up the dev tools, go to the network tab, filter for JavaScript and see how many analytics suites load.
We Value Your Feedback
How the suggestion box, once a simple tool for giving feedback, played a role in the weirder and darker data-hungry present for many companies.
Apple-centric digital privacy tools
A rundown of privacy tools that work well with Apple's technology ecosystem.
Surfing Upstream
In an era when hundreds of free web browsers exist, Orion Browser has a novel idea: It wants to charge money. Why’s that? Simple: It wants to fix the paradigm.
Digital privacy tools
This is a helpful, albeit basic, guide to online privacy tools.
EARN IT Act threatens end-to-end encryption
While we're all distracted by stockpiling latex gloves and toilet paper, there's a bill tiptoeing through the US Congress that could inflict the backdoor virus that law enforcement agencies have been trying to inflict on encryption for years.
FBI Director Chris Wray Pitches Weakened Encryption At A Cyber Security Conference
On May 29, 2018, the FBI promised to deliver an updated count of encrypted devices in its possession. As James Comey and his replacement, Chris Wray, continued to advocate for weakened encryption, the number of phones the FBI couldn't get into swelled from 880 in 2016 to over 7,800 by the time the FBI realized its phone-counting method was broken.
Tech companies agree to voluntary principles as governments ask for encryption backdoors
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Snap and Roblox have agreed to adopt 11 voluntary principles to prevent online child sexual exploitation, government officials said on Thursday.
Dressing for the Surveillance Age
Tom Goldstein, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, took an 'invisibility cloak' from a pile on a chair in his office and pulled it on over his head.
EARN IT is an attack on encryption
Yesterday a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators introduced a new bill called the EARN IT act. On its face, the bill seems like a bit of inside baseball having to do with legal liability for information service providers.
Firefox is showing the way back to a world that's private by default
One of the nice things about looking at the full scope of tech news for the day is that two stories that you otherwise wouldn't think to connect end up playing off each other perfectly. So it was today with the following pieces of news.
FCC Proposes to Fine Wireless Carriers $200M for Selling Customer Location Data
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today proposed fines of more than $200 million against the nation's four largest wireless carriers for selling access to their customers' location information without taking adequate precautions to prevent unauthorized access to that data.
Power to the People
When you upload photos to Instagram, back up your phone to 'the cloud', send an email through GMail, or save a document in a storage application like Dropbox or Google Drive, your data is being saved in a data center.