Category "Privacy" (2/3)

A high-profile expert panel met in Berlin on 31 Jan to discuss the nature and risks, but above all the rewards and opportunities of the GDPR. This blog post summarizes eight key thoughts emerging from the presentations and discussions at this inspirational and positively spirited discussion of the

Internalizing the history and philosophy behind the General Data Privacy Regulation is key for every designer in privacy-critical contexts. The GDPR is not a law that specifies detailed demands for consent forms or the like—it is a change agent for embracing ethical principles in dealing with personal data, across the EU and beyond.

My lightning talk from the beyond tellerrand Berlin warm-up on 2017-11-06: privacy as a core aspect of ethical UX design. “Don’t ask yourself ‘does what we are doing require a cookie banner’, but instead do something that respects the spirit of these privacy rules in the first place.”

“Reformatory” thinking, the idea that no individual should be subject to external control and limitation of their freedoms, is probably needed in 2017 just as much as it was in 1517. I spent a few hours on the 500th anniversary day of Luther’s reformation to familiarize myself with the philosophical thoughts by theologist Johanna Haberer.

The issue with tracking is not only one of obvious trackers but that, at least in theory, every piece of content loaded from other sites than the originating domain enables some degree of tracking.

“Democracy” by David Bernet is an exceptional film. Who would think that the birthing of an EU law could provide enough drama to power a feature-length documentary, given that the Brussels bureaucracy machine is commonly seen as a closed, cold and robotic community out of touch

The blog post “What should you think about when using Facebook?” by Data Scientist Vicky Boykis is a thorough - yet likely not even close to exhaustive - summary of various ways how Facebook tracks, monetises and manipulates its users. It has rightfully gained quite some visibility over

What is happening as we “google” something is essentially that we are telling a huge corporation what is on our mind right now and we trust that this corporation then knows to lead us to exactly what we are looking for. As people become more and more aware that a corporation knowing every one of us so well is not a good thing, the concept of the meta search engine is seeing a renaissance.

For the past year, I have almost exclusively been using alternative search engines. What started out as a self-experiment soon became such routine I almost forgot to write this blog post for my “Own your data” series. Maybe not quite able to compete with the smartest of full-text indexing algorithms, their power resides in the combination of several engine’s results and in the obfuscation of the user’s identity […]

Busy interacting with their media or contacts on the internet, what I call the “digitally blindfolded” barely notice the imminent danger of death as they stumble around on bike paths and between motorized traffic.

The apparent trend towards total extraction from the physical space makes me uncomfortable and I can’t help but wonder what is going on here […]

Creating something that has not existed before is at the core of the activity named “design”. Yet sometimes, not creating something is the best way to create something.

The thought of “undesign” - maybe not using that term in such reflected manner - is nothing new to most designers: a designer given the task to solve a certain challenge might well come to the conclusion that creating something new is not the best solution. […]

With the constantly decreasing threshold to gather, process and store more and more data points, ever more bits and pieces of information are translated into bytes and stored away on the never-ending harddrives of the so called “cloud”. Undeniably, there is great potential in data. However, the question needs to be asked: How much data is too much data?

In the fight to reverse the trend of excessive and uncontrolled storage of personal data and to put its human owners into focus through distributed solutions, a discussion on “data obesity” and approaches like MAD should be part of any design process involving user data. […]

In my January post titled Identity, content, audience and the (independent) web, I described the approach of using a self-owned website as the primary place to publish online content, while sending out (“syndicating”) copies of the content to social platforms. My motive was to reflect

Along with the purchase of my Android phone came the convenience of a free and easy cloud back-up of my phone contacts and seamless synchronization with Google Calendar. However, I have since become more wary about whom I want to share my data with.

I decided that it was time to say goodbye to Google and try out ownCloud, the open source software package for hosting one’s own cloud services. […]