Tracy Chou starts off by quoting David Foster Wallace:
The most important education we can receive, Wallace goes on to explain, “isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.”Building on that, the text evolves into a […]
An important report by the Ethics Advisory Group (EAG) of the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS):
This report seeks to propose terms and concepts that contribute to a constructive debate about the future of ethics in a full-fledged digital society. It identifies and clarifies […]
The “Digital Standard”, openly maintained under a CC-BY-4.0 license on Github, is an ambitious project to establish shared values in development of software-based products:
Our goals are to enable consumer organizations to test, evaluate, and report on whether new products […]
With the byline of “How to become a master manipulator of Visual Communication”, Eleana Gkogka provides a neat overview of the Gestalt laws and their importance in UX design:
It’s clear by now, visual design and psychology are linked and can influence one another. Gestalt […]
I’d never heard of the Domain of One's Own initiative or similiar before. This is a fantastic, almost revolutionary idea, and actually makes one think whether setting up a personal website with a personal domain shouldn’t be part of media education early on, maybe somewhere during […]
Pre-GDPR research paper concluding that consent is always needed for behavioural tracking;
This paper argues that in most circumstances the only available legal basis for the processing of personal data for behavioural targeting is the data subject’s unambiguous […]
A beautifully designed collection of laws that apply in UX (e.g. Fitts’ law, and some of the gestalt laws), with introductory texts on their origins and links to related resources. By Jon Yablonski. Update: In 2020, Jon Yablonski published an extended book version of the “Laws of […]
Summarizing this classic oversight by a major newsletter service provider, as responsibly disclosed by Terence Eden: The referrer (or: referer, as it is falsely spelled in the HTTP protocol) string of a browser coming from a newsletter contains the ID of the subscriber Website admin can open the […]
In this proof-of-concept, Jan Böhmer demonstrates how rather fine-grained tracking can be implemented by CSS-only: user clicks browser detection font detection hover duration input detection As the author states, this form of frontend tracking is essentially impossible to block:
The […]
The Belgian DPAs information website on privacy for young people (in French/Dutch) provides information material for young people and parents on how to protect their privacy. A nice example of educational material in the field of online privacy. Also has a very stylish “cookie banner” […]
Third-party scripts are probably the #1 cause of poor performance and bad UX on the web.Chris Coyer collects a range of sources that explain why third-party scripts on websites – and handing control over them to the marketing department – is bad for performance […]
Piwik is now Matomo – Our announcement: https://matomo.org/blog/2018/01/piwik-is-now-matomo/
Free/libre Google Analytics -alternative Piwik is now “Matomo”: no matter the name, the tool remains #1 choice for independent web analytics. #GDPR
The wireframes presented in this article should make every UX designer cringe: Johnny Ryan of PageFair embarks on a step-by-step journey through various GDPR requirements and Article 29 Working Party opinions/guidelines, illustrating how the wide range of purposes adtech companies process personal […]
Marcus Povey describes why a website should not show webmentions with embedded images from the source site (as it could allow the publisher of the source site to track the audience of the cited site). This is not Webmention or Indieweb specific, but a general privacy risk: whenever loading […]
We have built the digital world too rapidly. It was constructed layer upon layer, and many of the early layers were never meant to guard so many valuable things: our personal correspondence, our finances, the very infrastructure of our lives.Zeynep Tufekci pinpoints the […]
The internet is a great thing. It is also the biggest machine on earth, and it runs mostly on coal, which is bad news for our climate.The Planet Friendly Web Guide is an ongoing work-in-progress, written in the open (which in itself makes this an interesting project) […]
A fictional story showcasing a smart (social engineering) exploit to use npm packages as a backdoor vector for malicious code.
On any page that collects any data that you don’t want me (or my fellow attackers) to have, don’t use npm modules. Or Google Tag Manager, or ad networks […]
It’s Friday already again. First week of 2018 nearly done. 10 days until #btconf in #Munich. Excitement grows! https://beyondtellerrand.com/events/munich-2018
Kick off 2018 with a bang? Final call for @btconf #Munich, Jan 15-17! Fantastic web&design inspiration; my previous experiences