Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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…
Over the past year, we’ve seen schools shift to digital services at an unprecedented rate as a way to educate kids safely during the covid-19 pandemic. We’ve also seen these digital tools slurp up these kid’s data at a similarly unprecedented rate, suffer massive breaches, and generally handle student’s personal information with a lot less…
While I think we can all agree that every app on our phone is probably an invasive little shit, I’d argue that weather apps deserve their own little corner in hell. We’ve seen weather apps sign folks up for services without their say-so, sneakily get location data from users who deliberately turned that function off,…
For a platform that likes to keep reminding us over and over and over again that it prizes our individual privacy, Facebook’s done a pretty piss-poor job of actually following through. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the company purposefully prevent any of us from opting out of this sort of data-mining machine, while…
Google’s push to become a privacy-positive company over the past year has been, depending on how you look at it, an act of , a brilliant , or straight-up . So when Google CEO Sundar Pichai the company’s latest moves in the privacy-protecting space on Twitter yesterday, the biggest surprise—at least to me—was the I…
It’s easy to feel right now. Cities across the country are seeing unarmed protesters by police officers who enjoy both the full support of the current and of the itself. Congress is, in 2020, whether to . And there’s ! Meanwhile, even the people who emerge from this moment unscathed physically will, undoubtedly, find their…