Designing with privacy in mind – not just in a legal sense, but respecting human beings natural interest in controlling their data and considering the societal impact of privacy invasions – is at the core of all I do.
This story starts with a story of conscious technology non-use: an average American, so upset by the opaque tracking of his everyday life, that he decides to pull the plug in an act of self-defence:
Crum, a charming individual who shares his opinions freely, isn’t […]
Wolfie Christl aka CrackedLabs is known for his meticulous investigations of surveillance adtech’s inner workings. This latest research report, on the dangers and perils related to behavioral advertising in the online gambling context, is no exception. Methodologically built around the […]
responsibledata.io 
clearleft.com “The question protocol”, as suggested by Richard Rutter, is a handy heuristic to evaluate the data fields of a form:
When designing a form, you can ensure you are gathering only pertinent information by always invoking the question protocol. The question protocol forces you – and your organization – to ask yourselves why you are requesting a piece of information from a customer. Getting to the bottom of why you’re asking a question means determining precisely how you will be using the answer, if at all.[…]
If any person behaved like an app—rifled through your address book, fitted a tracking device to your car, obsessively logged what books and TV shows you watched, and wanted to disturb you at any moment of the day or night—you’d throw them out of your house and call the police.
What happened to our culture that this kind of abusive behaviour became so normalized it is not even questioned any more by most? Here’s a free and simple design heuristic for you: Don’t design any artifact that you would throw out of your house for anti-social conduct!
A critical art project using a hack to jam microphones in the vincinity for increased privacy:
We engineered a wearable microphone jammer that is capable of disabling microphones in its user’s surroundings, including hidden microphones. Our device is based on a recent exploit that […]
Google Maps Hacks by Berlin artist Simon Weckert is performance art at its best: not only for the artifact it creates (in the most ephemeral way, in form of a live data stream on Google Maps), but for the awareness it creates.
99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to […]
A team of researchers measured the amount of third parties called as websites include third-party scripts.
Using this concept, we show that including a single third party can lead to subsequent requests from up to eight additional services. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the […]
Peter Bihr builds a solid argument why “online ads on content fund its creation” is a so-called category error, where things that belong to one category are presented as belonging to another (where they don’t belong). The original social contract with ads on websites, he presents […]
For Wordpress sites, another data-minimalist stats tool (no personal data, no cookies) is Statify by Pluginkollektiv (also the makers of the privacy-friendly Akismet alternative Antispam Bee)
w3ctag.github.io I have always been a strong proponent of heuristic evaluation techniques (like Nielsen’s classic heuristic evaluation in UX). Hence, this W3C draft instantly piqued my interest:
This document provides a points to help in considering the privacy impact of a new feature or […]
The Future Of Privacy Forum (FPF) published a report PDF exploring the privacy impact of using IoT devices for people with disabilities.
“Internet of Things devices in homes, cars and on our bodies can improve the quality of life for people with disabilities—if they are designed to […]
This paper tickles my brain not just in the privacy domain, but neatly ties it into my interest in technology non-use. The researchers test the so-called shadow profile hypothesis: “the data shared by the users of an online service predicts personal information of non-users of the […]
The web can no longer be a career choice for people who want to work in a field where there are no obligations, no ethics, no rules, and no constraints.Heather Burns once and for all dismissing the legend of the martyr techie tortured by ever-increasing regulation around […]
Addressing the widespread concern with the big tech giants taking too much control over people’s lives, Kashmir Hill enrolls in a self-experiment:
The common retort to these concerns is that you should “just stop using their services.” So I decided to try.What […]
The makers of the Ghostery tracking blocker plugin use data from that plugin (on an opt-in basis) to analyze and present who web users are being tracked by.
An interesting hack project: a “teachable parasite” device (open source), feeding smart home assistants noise unless the user really wants to interact with them. It’s a small, remote-controlled device sitting on top of the home assistant, disturbing its microphones unless the user […]
A summary of Nick Couldry’s Nov 2018 lecture “Colonised by data: the hollowing out of digital society” at the Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft (HIIG) Berlin. The lecture builds on the comparison of today’s digital economy with traditional […]
Adopted 70 years ago today, Art. 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights grants protection of privacy - today enforced by GDPR and similar laws (Photo: Eleanor Roosevelt holding an UDHR poster in 1949; public domain).
cnet.com 