As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today's open platforms. Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.

Now let me get back to your question. The FBI presents its conflict with Apple over locked phones as a case as of privacy versus security. Yes, smartphones carry a lot of personal data—photos, texts, email, and the like. But they also carry business and account information; keeping that secure is really important. The problem is that if you make it easier for law enforcement to access a locked device, you also make it easier for a bad actor—a criminal, a hacker, a determined nation-state—to do so as well. And that's why this is a security vs. security issue.

The FBI — along with many other law enforcement and surveillance agents — insists that it is possible to make crypto that will protect our devices, transactions, data, communications and lives, but which will fail catastrophically whenever a cop needs it to. When technologists explain that this isn't a thing, the FBI insists that they just aren't nerding hard enough.

Barr makes the point that this is about “consumer cybersecurity” and not “nuclear launch codes.” This is true, but it ignores the huge amount of national security-related communications between those two poles. The same consumer communications and computing devices are used by our lawmakers, CEOs, legislators, law enforcement officers, nuclear power plant operators, election officials and so on. There’s no longer a difference between consumer tech and government tech—it’s all the same tech.

The answers for law enforcement, social networks, and medical data won’t be the same. As we move toward greater surveillance, we need to figure out how to get the best of both: how to design systems that make use of our data collectively to benefit society as a whole, while at the same time protecting people individually.

A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

My problem with quips like these — as right as they are — is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It’s not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

“They can see you, but you can’t see them, which I didn’t feel good about,”

Similarly, technology can help us control the climate, make AI safe, and improve privacy.

Legislation to stem the tide of Big Tech companies' abuses, and laws—such as a national consumer privacy bill, an interoperability bill, or a bill making firms liable for data-breaches—would go a long way toward improving the lives of the Internet users held hostage inside the companies' walled gardens. But far more important than fixing Big Tech is fixing the Internet: restoring the kind of dynamism that made tech firms responsive to their users for fear of losing them, restoring the dynamic that let tinkerers, co-ops, and nonprofits give every person the power of technological self-determination.

In fact, these platforms have become inseparable from their data: we use “Facebook” to refer to both the application and the data that drives that application. The result is that nearly every Web app today tries to ask you for more and more data again and again, leading to dangling data on duplicate and inconsistent profiles we can no longer manage. And of course, this comes with significant privacy concerns.

working in public, and asking students to work in public, is fraught with dangers and challenges.

 recording it all in a Twitter thread that went viral and garnered the hashtag  #PlaneBae.

molecules

A friend of mine asked if I’d thought through the contradiction of criticizing Blair publicly like this, when she’s another not-quite public figure too.

Even when the attention is positive, it is overwhelming and frightening. Your mind reels at the possibility of what they could find: your address, if your voting records are logged online; your cellphone number, if you accidentally included it on a form somewhere; your unflattering selfies at the beginning of your Facebook photo archive. There are hundreds of Facebook friend requests, press requests from journalists in your Instagram inbox, even people contacting your employer when they can’t reach you directly. This story you didn’t choose becomes the main story of your life. It replaces who you really are as the narrative someone else has written is tattooed onto your skin.

the woman on the plane has deleted her own Instagram account after receiving violent abuse from the army Blair created.

We actively create our public selves, every day, one social media post at a time.

in the not-so-distant future, it will show targeted ads to users on WhatsApp

To defeat facial recognition software, “you would have to wear a mask or disguises,” Tien says. “That doesn’t really scale up for people.”

reminding your students that you value and respect their privacy and their culture.

L’homme asservi n’est pas seulement contraint, il consent à sa contrainte.

and as a result, the requirement to use this tracking permission will go into effect early next year.

There are clever ways around trackers

These creeping changes help us forget how important our privacy is and miss that it’s being eroded.

Turns out, there’s a dedicated “Individual Account Appeal Form” where they ask you a list of privacy-touching mandatory questions, progressively shifting the Overton window

I have pixelized the faces of the recognizable people wearing a red cord (as they don't want to appear on pictures). I hope is fine.

a new kind of power

Our membership inference attack exploits the observationthat machine learning models often behave differently on thedata that they were trained on versus the data that they “see”for the first time.

It is the natural trajectory of business to seek out new ways to drive revenue from products like microwaves, televisions, refrigerators, and speakers. And now that microwaves and TVs can effectively operate as mini-computers, it feels inevitable that manufacturers would look to collect potentially valuable data — whether for resale, for product optimization, or to bring down the sticker price of the device.

This advertising system is designed to enable hyper-targeting, which has many unintended consequences that have dominated the headlines in recent years, such as the ability for bad actors to use the system to influence elections, to exclude groups in a way that facilitates discrimination, and to expose your personal data to companies you’ve never even heard of.

if you search for something on Google, you may start seeing ads for it everywhere.

Alarmingly, Google now deploys hidden trackers on 76% of websites across the web to monitor your behavior and Facebook has hidden trackers on about 25% of websites, according to the Princeton Web Transparency & Accountability Project. It is likely that Google and/or Facebook are watching you on most sites you visit, in addition to tracking you when using their products.

There were also underlying security issues. Most of the messaging apps Tor Messenger supported are based on client-server architectures, and those can leak metadata (such as who's involved in a conversation and when) that might reveal who your friends are. There was no real way for the Tor crew to mitigate these issues.

Tor suggests CoyIM, but it's prone to the same metadata issues as Messenger. You may have to accept that a small amount of chat data could find its way into the wrong hands, even if the actual conversations are locked down tight.

Of course, with Facebook being Facebook, there is another, more commercial outlet for this type of metadata analysis. If the platform knows who you are, and knows what you do based on its multi-faceted internet tracking tools, then knowing who you talk to and when could be a commercial goldmine. Person A just purchased Object 1 and then chatted to Person B. Try to sell Object 1 to Person B. All of which can be done without any messaging content being accessed.

users will not want to see data mining expanding across their WhatsApp metadata. But if that’s the price to maintain encryption, one can assume it will be a relatively easy sell for most users.

As uber-secure messaging platform Signal has warned, “Signal is recommended by the United States military. It is routinely used by senators and their staff. American allies in the EU Commission are Signal users too. End-to-end encryption is fundamental to the safety, security, and privacy of conversations worldwide.”

EFF describes this as “a major threat,” warning that “the privacy and security of all users will suffer if U.S. law enforcement achieves its dream of breaking encryption.”

As EFF has warned, “undermining free speech and privacy is not the way to protect children.”

Someone had taken control of my iPad, blasting through Apple’s security restrictions and acquiring the power to rewrite anything that the operating system could touch. I dropped the tablet on the seat next to me as if it were contagious. I had an impulse to toss it out the window. I must have been mumbling exclamations out loud, because the driver asked me what was wrong. I ignored him and mashed the power button. Watching my iPad turn against me was remarkably unsettling. This sleek little slab of glass and aluminum featured a microphone, cameras on the front and back, and a whole array of internal sensors. An exemplary spy device.

In other words, it’s the procedure to prevent Google from “cross-referencing” information from Analytics with other data in its possession.

Companies that show their customers that they take privacy seriously will earn their trust and loyalty.

Consent means offering individuals real choice and control. Genuine consent should put individuals in charge, build trust and engagement, and enhance your reputation.

We present results from technical experiments which reveal that WeChat communications conducted entirely among non-China-registered accounts are subject to pervasive content surveillance that was previously thought to be exclusively reserved for China-registered accounts.

A complete snapshot of the user’s browser window at that moment in time will be captured, pixel by pixel (!)

The mix of a fingerprint and first-party cookies is pervasive as Google can give a very high level of entropy when it comes to distinguishing an individual person.

Google encouraging site admins to put reCaptcha all over their sites, and then sharing the resulting risk scores with those admins is great for security, Perona thinks, because he says it “gives site owners more control and visibility over what’s going on” with potential scammer and bot attacks, and the system will give admins more accurate scores than if reCaptcha is only using data from a single webpage to analyze user behavior. But there’s the trade-off. “It makes sense and makes it more user-friendly, but it also gives Google more data,”

This kind of cookie-based data collection happens elsewhere on the internet. Giant companies use it as a way to assess where their users go as they surf the web, which can then be tied into providing better targeted advertising.

For instance, Google’s reCaptcha cookie follows the same logic of the Facebook “like” button when it’s embedded in other websites—it gives that site some social media functionality, but it also lets Facebook know that you’re there.

one of the ways that Google determines whether you’re a malicious user or not is whether you already have a Google cookie installed on your browser.

But this new, risk-score based system comes with a serious trade-off: users’ privacy.

they sought to eliminate data controllers and processors acting without appropriate permission, leaving citizens with no control as their personal data was transferred to third parties and beyond

“Until CR 1.0 there was no effective privacy standard or requirement for recording consent in a common format and providing people with a receipt they can reuse for data rights.  Individuals could not track their consents or monitor how their information was processed or know who to hold accountable in the event of a breach of their privacy,” said Colin Wallis, executive director, Kantara Initiative.  “CR 1.0 changes the game.  A consent receipt promises to put the power back into the hands of the individual and, together with its supporting API — the consent receipt generator — is an innovative mechanism for businesses to comply with upcoming GDPR requirements.  For the first time individuals and organizations will be able to maintain and manage permissions for personal data.”

Its purpose is to decrease the reliance on privacy policies and enhance the ability for people to share and control personal information.

I will need to find a workaround for one of my private extensions that controls devices in my home network, and its source code cannot be uploaded to Mozilla because of my and my family's privacy.

I will need to find a workaround for one of my private extensions that controls devices in my home network, and its source code cannot be uploaded to Mozilla because of my and my family's privacy.

I'm really tired with mozilla,everything good about them is going away,I don't think they are security or privacy focused anymore and waterfox is a nice alternative to firefox.

Don’t share any private, identifiable information on social media It may be fun to talk about your pets with your friends on Instagram or Twitter, but if Fluffy is the answer to your security question, then you shouldn’t share that with the world. This may seem quite obvious, but sometimes you get wrapped up in an online conversation, and it is quite easy to let things slip out. You may also want to keep quiet about your past home or current home locations or sharing anything that is very unique and identifiable. It could help someone fake your identity.

Don’t share vacation plans on social media Sharing a status of your big trip to the park on Saturday may be a good idea if you are looking to have a big turnout of friends to join you, but not when it comes to home and personal safety. For starters, you have just broadcasted where you are going to be at a certain time, which can be pretty dangerous if you have a stalker or a crazy ex. Secondly, you are telling the time when you won’t be home, which can make you vulnerable to being robbed. This is also true if you are sharing selfies of yourself on the beach with a caption that states “The next 2 weeks are going to be awesome!” You have just basically told anyone who has the option to view your photo and even their friends that you are far away from home and for how long.

But now, I think there’s still some lack of clarity from consumers on exactly what they need to do

The notices were meant as a jumping-off point where people could begin the journey of understanding how each of their applications and the websites they visit use their data. But, they have probably had the opposite effect

Finally, from a practical point of view, we suggest the adoption of "privacy label," food-like notices, that provide the required information in an easily understandable manner, making the privacy policies easier to read. Through standard symbols, colors and feedbacks — including yes/no statements, where applicable — critical and specific scenarios are identified. For example, whether or not the organization actually shares the information, under what specific circumstances this occurs, and whether individuals can oppose the share of their personal data. This would allow some kind of standardized information. Some of the key points could include the information collected and the purposes of its collection, such as marketing, international transfers or profiling, contact details of the data controller, and distinct differences between organizations’ privacy practices, and to identify privacy-invasive practices.

Finally, from a practical point of view, we suggest the adoption of "privacy label," food-like notices, that provide the required information in an easily understandable manner, making the privacy policies easier to read.