Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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…
Last summer, when her daughter was still drinking formula, Brittani Roberts often drove from store to store trying to find enough to feed her. When her daughter was teething last month, Roberts repeated the exercise — this time driving to five stores while her friend tried an additional four to find Tylenol or Motrin for…
The following is a true story. Or maybe it’s just based on a true story. Perhaps it’s not true at all. It’s been a frantic week of security scares — it seems like every day there’s a new vulnerability. It’s been a real struggle for me personally to pretend like I understand what’s going on…
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…
Because The U.S. Is Too Corrupt To Pass Privacy Legislation, Data Brokers Increasingly Traffic In Sensitive Mental Health Data from the have-you-ever-noticed-that-making-money-is-the-only-thing-we-actually-care-about dept We’ve noted for a long while that the performative hysteria surrounding TikTok is basically a giant distraction from our failures on consumer protection and privacy legislation. Case in point: the growing number…
This is a post about journalism, privacy, and the common assumption that we can’t have one without sacrificing at least some of the other, because (the assumption goes), the business model for journalism is tracking-based advertising, aka adtech. I’ve been fighting that assumption for a long time. People vs. Adtech is a collection of 129 pieces…
Mobile advertising is big business, and where money flows, fraudsters follow. Last year, advertisers spent over $327 billion targeting users as they engaged with popular mobile apps, but as HUMAN Security announced yesterday, a chunk of that spending went into the pockets of fraudsters who successfully launched a massive ad fraud scheme. HUMAN discovered the…
Yikes, y’all. I don’t even smoke and I feel like I need a cigarette before I get this thing started. We’re here to talk about Hogwarts Legacy, and to do that we need to discuss the whole mess. Pull up a chair, pour yourself some tea, wrap yourself in a blanket, scream into a pillow…
(Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images) Right-wing officials insisted their push to overturn Roe v. Wade was an effort to respect states’ rights and the democratic process. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch (R), who represented her state in its successful effort to invalidate Roe, wrote a November 2021 op-ed in the Washington Post claiming…
For many viewers of the Super Bowl, one ad amid the beer and tax software and car commercials may be particularly surprising. It might look something like this: A guitar strums a melancholy tune. Black and white photos, depicting mothers, fathers, and sons living in what looks to be impoverished Central American towns, cycle through….