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.
I wrote about how our lives are under the control of tech companies & what it means. Please read it on your device. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/12/wake-up-amazon-google-apple-facebook-run-our-lives
A great article, can’t decide which parts to quote - pls read the whole thing. And start working on alternative futures tmrw (designers!)
I quit Facebook in 2013, and as a direct result of this, I have fallen out of touch with many friends. People have had babies, people have got […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Guardian’s op-ed on big data highlights the threat corporate surveillance poses not only on an individual level, but to democratic culture as a whole.
There are two kinds of privacy under threat in the emerging economy, where everyone is almost always connected to the internet […]
The PRISM Break project curates a comprehensive list of privacy-minded free and open source software projects that
Help make mass surveillance of entire populations uneconomical! We all have a right to privacy, which you can exercise today by encrypting your communications and ending […]
I don’t use Facebook nor Chrome for the very reasons this project advocates, so cannot put it to the test myself, but Data Selfie by Hang Do Thi Duc and Regina Flores Mir looks like a great tool to bring closer to the user just how much social network providers know about […]
“I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web. We aim to fix that.Terms of Service; Didn’t Read (ToS;DR) is a site that dissects the terms and privacy policies nobody ever reads and evaluates services based on these. While the site […]
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 […]
We are living in the age of data. “What It Takes To Truly Delete Data” by Mimi Onuoha tells the story of hard drive disposal to illustrate three key facts about data: “All data […] is stored on a physical device somewhere.” As long as this is not a single device under […]
DuckDuckGo, the provider of a search engine that doesn’t track its users (see my earlier blog post), did a study about how users believe the “Private browsing” feature of their browser works:
Despite Private Browsing being one of the most commonly known and used […]
“Browsing Histories” is a journalistic illustration of how even the most barebone meta data trail created while using the internet gives away identity, interests, and more:
[…] the electronic communication transactional records, or the communication data – such […]
Solid is an exciting new project led by Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, taking place at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute. The project aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved […]
What do scientists, regulators and lawyers mean when they talk about de-identification? How does anonymous data differ from pseudonymous or de-identified information? Data identifiability is not binary. Data lies on a spectrum with multiple shades of identifiability.The […]
There is a lot of interesting analysis and recommendation in the “Growing up digital” report from the UK’s Children’s Commissioner referenced in this article - and the simplified terms and conditions (that nobody ever reads) are only the most obvious of its gems - , but the […]
Just getting started on reading up on the proceedings from the August #MyData conference in Helsinki.
“The best outcome for personal data is that we all naturally think of data as we think of money,” says Lawrence [Neil Lawrence, University of Sheffield, UK]: some money we […]
Cifas, a non-profit for fraud protection, recently published “Data to Go”, a brilliant candid camera clip. Passers-by are asked to “like” a coffee shop on Facebook in exchange for a cup of free coffee …and, as they will find out, a lot more: they receive a mug with all […]
An avid user of strict privacy blockers myself, I have long been advocating that every web developer should test their websites in scenarios with blocked third-party resources (I can’t even count the number of times I run into websites where some functionalities don’t work because a […]
Personal privacy in the networked age is limited by three dimensions of “veillance.” They shape people’s behavior and their anxieties about the future of privacy. At Harvard University’s symposium “Privacy in a Networked World,” Lee Rainie will present the latest survey […]
Commercial tracking of web users is a massive problem. Even more so, when people browse seemingly trustworthy websites (as the government’s official sites, in this case) and those leak personal information – here potentially revealing something about that user’s health or health […]
This website has extensive background and material on Ann Cavoukian’s “Privacy by Design” framework from the 1990s:
Privacy by Design is a framework that was developed by the former Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Dr. Ann Cavoukian. Privacy by Design […]
The late Ulrich Beck (✝2015-01-01), father of the concept of the “risk society”, on digital freedom:
The violation of our freedom does not hurt. We neither feel it, nor do we suffer a disease, a flood, a lack of opportunities to find a job, and so on. Freedom dies without […]
