EFF: “As Congress ponders legislation to reform “big tech,” it must view comprehensive digital privacy legislation as desperately needed civil rights legislation, because data abuses often disproportionately harm communities already bearing the brunt of other inequalities. Harvesting and monetizing personal data whenever anyone uses social media or even vital online services has become ubiquitous, yet… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: E-Commerce
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, April 15, 2023
Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, April 15, 2023 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly… Continue Reading
Were you caught up in the latest data breach? Here’s how to tell
ZDNet: “Wondering if your information was posted online from a data breach? Here’s how to check if your accounts are at risk and what to do next…IBM estimates that the average cost of a data breach in 2022 for companies was $4.35 million, with 83% of organizations experiencing one or more security incidents. However, talk of… Continue Reading
Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to more users worldwide
Mozilla Blog: “Take back your privacy – Firefox is rolling out Total Cookie Protection by default to more Firefox users worldwide, making Firefox the most private and secure major browser available across Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. Total Cookie Protection is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were… Continue Reading
Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk
Schnadower Mustri, Eduardo and Adjerid, Idris and Acquisti, Alessandro, Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare: An Empirical Investigation (March 23, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4398428 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4398428 “The value that consumers derive from behavioral advertising has been more often posited than empirically demonstrated. The majority of empirical work on behavioral advertising has focused on estimating the… Continue Reading
How Bookshop.org Survives and Thrives in Amazon’s World
Wired: “…What started as a favor done on a business-trip whim has since become the great project of Hunter’s professional life. In its first few years of existence, Bookshop defied even its founder’s expectations and demonstrated how helpful its model could be for small businesses. Now, Hunter has a new plot twist in mind: He… Continue Reading
If It’s Advertised to You Online, You Probably Shouldn’t Buy It. Here’s Why.
The New York Times: “…The ability to track people has turned out to be an unbeatable advantage for the online ad industry, which has grown to a $540 billion market worldwide, according to the media agency GroupM, dwarfing all other forms of advertising, including TV, radio and newspapers. It has propelled the massive growth of Google… Continue Reading
Best Buy’s new recycling program will let you mail in your old electronics
Engadget: “Best Buy announced today that it’s extending its gadget recycling program to include a new mail-in option. The retailer will now sell you a box for your used electronics that you can ship back for recycling, saving a trip to the store. Best Buy says it’s recycled 2.7 billion pounds of electronics and appliances… Continue Reading
Audiobooks Without Audible: The Hard Lessons I’ve Learned Routing Around Amazon
Publishers Weekly: “With a Kickstarter campaign now underway for the audio edition of his new book, ‘Red Team Blues,’ Cory Doctorow shares the mistakes of his past campaigns—and why it’s all worth it. My next novel is Red Team Blues. It’s a major title for my publisher, Tor (which is part of Macmillan), and the… Continue Reading
FTC Proposes Rule Provision – “Click to Cancel” Recurring Subscriptions and Memberships
“The Federal Trade Commission today proposed a “click to cancel” provision requiring sellers to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up. That is just one of several significant updates the Commission is proposing to its rules regarding subscriptions and recurring payments. The new click to cancel… Continue Reading
OpenAI is massively expanding ChatGPT’s capabilities to let it browse the web and more
The Verge: “OpenAI is adding support for plug-ins to ChatGPT — an upgrade that massively expands the chatbot’s capabilities and gives it access for the first time to live data from the web. Up until now, ChatGPT has been limited by the fact it can only pull information from its training data, which ends in… Continue Reading
Create images with your words – Bing Image Creator comes to the new Bing
Microsoft Blogs: “Last month we introduced the new AI-powered Bing and Microsoft Edge, your copilot for the web – delivering better search, complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to create content. Already, we have seen that chat is reinventing how people search with more than 100 million chats to date. We’ve seen… Continue Reading
