Privacy

Data ownership is the way to go

Privacy for the sake of privacy

Yesterday, I came across Keith Axline’s post “Privacy Is Just the First Step, the Goal Is Data Ownership“. I wholeheartedly agree with the concept of data ownership. I think we should elevate data ownership as a fundamental human right and take it from there. This tidbit caught my attention: Privacy for privacy’s sake is a […]
Collateral data collection

It’s not just you

Collateral data collection

Let me first state that I would never have my DNA tested by companies like 23andme and Ancestry. It is not that I [...]

Collecting data comes with big responsibility

Contrarian view: collecting private data for good

Sometimes the media goes on a tangent and seem to agree universally on a particular issue. In those circumstances, I like to explore the contrarian viewpoint to balance my own viewpoint. In this post, I’m going diving into privacy and especially Facebook and Google’s hunger for collecting your data. Both Google and Facebook have one […]

Your data is out there

Control your personal data

This week Quora got hacked and the account information of 100M users was exposed. The week before Starwood admitted they were hacked for several years and details of an estimated 500M people were exposed. And then there were the hacks of: Yahoo (3B accounts) Equifax (143M accounts) JPMorganChase (83M accounts) Anthem (80M accounts) Target (70M accounts) […]

This is what keeps me up at night

Data integrity and privacy

One of the major concerns I have with regard to privacy is data integrity. With data integrity, I mean that the correctness of the data used. Now, today much of the data is used for serving you ads, but plenty of startups are working on using the data for other purposes like issuing loans or […]

Hands off please

Personal data ownership as a fundamental right

The biggest conundrum about privacy is data ownership. Who owns the data and especially if it’s about yourself. EU’s GPDR puts responsibilities in place on collecting data, informing users about which data is collected and the data can be only used for the disclosed purpose. It also gives rights to users to remove and change […]

Censorship & ethics

Last week a presentation of Google research called “The Good Censor” was leaked. It’s a good summary of the burden on we put on tech companies to “police” the internet. Often times the examples we see in the media are overly simplified cases. The devil is in the details – especially for multinational companies. Slide […]

Honey, I broke the internet!

I’ve been an adblocker since early 2000s. I did it for three reasons: – Reduce cognitive load of the web – ads are meant to grab your attention but distract you from the actual content – Speed up browsing – ads slows down page loading significantly. – Privacy and tracking prevention Early on adblocking didn’t […]

Browser Fingerprinting

Yesterday, I was reading an excellent review by Ars Technica on Mojave. One of the new features which stood out to me is the new fingerprinting protection in Safari 12. In the article a few sites are mentioned to test your browser and I tried them all out: Browserprint Am I unique? Panopticlick by EFF […]