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.
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 […]
Pre-GDPR research paper concluding that consent is always needed for behavioural tracking;
This paper argues that in most circumstances the only available legal basis for the processing of personal data for behavioural targeting is the data subject’s unambiguous […]
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 […]
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 […]
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” […]
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 […]
While I feel that performance has finally found its place on the agenda in web projects, it’s about time to push privacy, accessibility and ethics to the spotlight as well. Still way too often forgotten or dismissed for the sake of business.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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” […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
