Posts Tagged ‘privacy’
Facebook is not the devil
Hey, don’t get me wrong, I have been terribly troubled by Facebook’s ‘surveillance economy’ model: the way it tracks and analyses its users’ social graph and extrapolates a map of their ‘interests’ and demographic information before delivering them (the users) and their privacy up like lambs to the slaughter on the altar of commerce and, […]
Facebook is holding ‘your’ readers captive
A little while ago I helped a mate extinguish his Facebook profile. He’d had enough of it. In my own case, I run a very limited profile there and often wince when people (‘friends’) post material which refers to me. I see that as adding data points to the humungous conglomerated information that the rapacious […]
What a photo of Patrick Gower!
Wow. Great shot. Talk about moody. Source: Newshub Features on Twitter. I’ve recently been thinking (again) about how media organizations harvest people-in-the-news’s social media profiles – often without permission and often murky about attribution – Source: “supplied” or “Facebook”. I hope I don’t sound too much like a hypocrite because I do use pix “published” on […]
They laughed when I stuck tape over my web cam…
I’m not kidding. One of the first things I did at a new workplace was stick a small rectangle of Post-it note over the web cam. It provoked a few comments re “paranoia”, but did I care? Nope. Then, months later, I read that FBI director James Comey did the same thing, citing people who […]
On arrogance and credulity
I’ve had cause to think about privacy issues recently, and situations where people and organisations can fairly be said to have ‘interfered’ with someone’s privacy (well, mine, in fact, but that’s a story for later). Today I stumbled across a 2012 non-apology letter from then Social Development Minister Paula Bennett who faced an adverse finding […]
What is Privacy?
Nice 3 minute overview from Privacy International … A chilling line: “…Even the fact that you’re watching this video right now. All of it.” Oh great! Then read this: Even basic phone logs can reveal deeply personal information, researchers find | The Guardian Here’s a link to Privacy International’s website. – P
A shiver of recognition. World War III propaganda poster designs
Wow, there’s something about these poster designs by Bill McMullen – visualising what might be themes of ‘messaging’ from the gummint in the event of the simmering cold war turning hot. Take a look at these and more and read the article by P.W. Singer and August Cole at the Motherboard website.
Peter Watts at Canada Privacy Symposium — ‘Burn the Data to the Ground’
A surprising and very interesting presentation about authoritarian surveillance — its link to fear, and being aware of hard-wired responses including dominance and anti-predator behaviours … with a side swipe at the roots of ‘religious belief’. I like Peter Watts’ approach to the topic, looking back at the powerful and another take on ‘only the […]
Why privacy matters: a TED talk by Glenn Greenwald
Comments about Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerburg — actions speak louder than their words. – P
The law of unintended consequences. Data security edition.
This report from Flashpoint: ‘Measuring the Impact of the Snowden Leaks on the Use of Encryption by Online Jihadists’ (available here as web page or PDF) concludes (SPOILER:) Meh, not so much. The Flashpoint report recounts how the use of encryption techniques by such groups — and the promotion by them of such techniques — […]
Tim Cook denies ‘rumours’ of NSA back-door into Apple servers
This 3 minute excerpt of Apple’s CEO Tim Cook talking to Charlie Rose yesterday interested me for a couple of reasons 1) encrypted iMessages with Apple keyless and 2) his very strong denial of rumours/suggestions of NSA back-door access … ‘the Snowden thing’ (starts 2:10, but watch the whole 3 mins): Which accords with this […]
An (extra) step in the right direction: Apple extending two-factor authentication to iCloud.com log-in
A while back, I enabled two-factor authentication to a number of my accounts following Mat Honan’s terrible hacking story.* This morning I noticed that, without any fanfare, Apple has extended that preference to the iCloud.com website portal … … so that to log in to iCloud, I need to have one of my ‘trusted devices’. […]
Listen to the spy movie soundtrack on this ad for the VYSK smartphone case
Making a buck out of people’s paranoia/rational fear of cyber warfare and espionage … and these (apparently) terribly insecure devices many of us carry with us everywhere. Vysk: Putting Privacy Back in Your Hands from Mustache Production on Vimeo. Read all about it: www.vysk.com (not an affiliate link). – P Update: Audio of soundtrack here: […]
