Category "Privacy" (2/3)

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. […]

My previous post on Privacy-Aware Design (“Replacing Google Analytics with a decentralized alternative”) discussed the inherent privacy issue when a private corporation is able to track users around a large part of the internet.

I presented how the provision of a free service with undeniable benefits for website owners has led to a situation where Google is able to track any internet user around half of the web and that it happens without explicit consent of the end-users (who may only protect themselves from being tracked by browser privacy add-ons).

Following the same train of thought, the next topic in this series are social media integration practices. […]

In late 2005, Google started to provide free access to a web analytics product based on the previously expensive Urchin software suite. In the seven years since, this strategy succeeded to get Google Analytics tracking code included in a stunning share of websites by providing access to a powerful tool at (seemingly) no cost for everyone from big corporations to hobbyist bloggers.

“Oh, and we’ll of course add Google Analytics to the site” is a common phrase in the context of a web project, by large agencies and teenage family webmasters alike: Google has managed to define their product as an implicit standard for visitor analysis on the web. Adding the tracking code is easy and the data the service provides is of unquestionable quality.

Yet, privacy advocates have long pointed out the serious implications of one corporation being able to track users around such a massive slice of the internet […]