In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy […]
#privacy (2/6)
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.
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Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud inkandswitch.com
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Study: Online trackers follow health site visitors news.cornell.edu
Websites with less trackers, a study from Cornell University highlights, may actually be more harmful in their privacy violation than sites with dozens of them. -
Stop Using Encrypted Email latacora.singles
An interesting perspective on “encrypted email” in this article. It is not so much concerned with the strength of encryption, but with the systemic insecurity inherent to the system of email as a by-default open and interoperable system:
You can reasonably want email to be […]
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Wearable Microphone Jamming sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Category Error: Tracking Ads Are Not a Funding Mechanism thewavingcat.com
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 […]
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January 28 is Data Protection Day, and here are three voices I strongly would like to see heard. -
10 Reasons Why Online Advertising is Broken en.panoptykon.org
In “10 Reasons Why Online Advertising is Broken”, Karolina Iwańska summarizes the toxicity of behavioural advertising not in one, but ten, points (and stresses that this list is not exhaustive). Starting out with the illusion of consent and intrusive profiling, she frames the […]
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Should you self-host Google Fonts? tunetheweb.com
To answer the question in the title of this post: yes it’s better to self-host as the performance gains are substantial.
This extensive and thorough analysis of the benefits of self-hosting Google Fonts (but also addressing some of the potential shortcomings) is […] -
Data Patterns Catalogue catalogue.projectsbyif.com
Privacy-related pattern libraries are a neat tool for designers. While not necessarily ready to use in a “plug-and-play” matter (the list of Pros and Cons commonly is just too complex to re-use patterns 1:1), they provide valuable pointers to reflect on possible design options. The […]
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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)
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Self-Review Questionnaire: Security and Privacy
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 […]
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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 […]
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Collective aspects of privacy in the Twitter social network epjdatascience.springeropen.com
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 […]
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The era of sociopaths is over webdevlaw.uk
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 […] -
Life Without the Tech Giants gizmodo.com
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.
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Cutting back on privacy-invading ad tech, the NYT managed to increase their EU ad revenue. A significant finding - and proof for privacy-centred UX thinking to pay off?
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Project Alias bjoernkarmann.dk
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 […]
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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 […]
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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).
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This follow-up on the "layered approach" discusses the EDPB guidelines’ suggestions for shaping the transparency information itself: content, language, accessibility, intelligibility, etc. -
Designing accessible web with privacy - when web browsing reveals information blog.lukaszolejnik.com
Lukasz Olejnik presents how implementing accessibility in browsers may compromise the privacy of users of assistive technology.