#privacy (2/3)
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Lukasz Olejnik presents how implementing accessibility in browsers may compromise the privacy of users of assistive technology. -
This brilliant Podcast episode makes the rather abstract formula that "privacy is not about individuals' decisions" tangible through real-life examples. -
A detailed report, documenting how Google, Facebook and Microsoft use UI dark patterns to deceive and manipulate users towards accepting low privacy defaults; by the Norwegian Consumer Council. -
I was delighted to find this blog post, reviewing recent examples of UX solutions for GDPR-compliant marketing consent. This is the kind of reviews designers concerned with privacy need, in order to generate an industry-wide debate about (slowly emerging) practices and work out optimal solutions over time. -
Just anonymising data does not mean it is no longer personal data - more often than not it needs to be treated with similar care as data that carries individual identifiers. -
Following the Strava heatmap debacle, I encountered this study by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab via Twitter:
Fitness tracking devices monitor heartbeats, measure steps, sleep, and tie into a larger ecosystem of goal setting, diet tracking, and other health activities […]
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Readthedocs.io, a popular platform for creating and publishing software documentation, documents their responsible approach to online ads on their service:
EthicalAds respect users while providing value to advertisers. We don’t track you, sell your data, or anything else. We simply […]
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The Irish Data Protection Commissioner published a brochure with learning materials aimed at secondary schools.
The aim of the resource is to raise awareness amongst young people of their rights to privacy, the importance of taking control of their personal information, the rights they […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Particularly relevant for privacy design is the authors' category of ATS-C: third-party services that may process unique identifiers despite their primary purpose is not tracking as such. -
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 […]
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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 […]
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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” […]
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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 […] -
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […] -
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 […]
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Uh-oh. While generally enthusiastic of using technology for solving mankind’s problems, and with the global phenomenon of urbanisation amassing plenty of those, this analysis by Privacy International drawing a grim picture of the forces at play around much-hyped “smart cities” […]
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In this pre-Snowden essay from 2007 (PDF), Daniel J. Solove presents one of the most thorough attempts to disprove the “I have nothing to hide” attitude towards privacy I have encountered:
the problem with the nothing to hide argument is the underlying assumption that […]
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Largely building upon queer theory and its understanding of temporality, “For the moment” by Benjamin Haber elaborates on yet another aspect of human life that the digital economy believes to be able to solve by introducing a simple binary. As it is being understood that the default of […]
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Following introductory words on “service needs” and “business needs” vs. “user needs”, Maria Izquierdo and Martin Jordan showcase some instances where data is (even in breach of legal contracts) collected against users’ interest and with the potential to […]
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The Responsible Data Forum, a collaboration that develops tools and strategies to help data-driven advocacy with ethical, security and privacy implications of their work, was mentioned in Zara Rahman’s talk at Datensummit 17. The RDF defines “responsible data” as:
The […]
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After PRISM Break, that I posted about last week, here is another valuable resource that aims to create a list of any tools related to personal privacy online:
privacytools.io is a socially motivated website that provides information for protecting your data security and privacy. never […]