The New York Times: “On a Sunday night in September, Ashley Estrada was at a friend’s home in Los Angeles when she received a strange notification on her iPhone: “AirTag Detected Near You.”An AirTag is a 1.26-inch disc with location-tracking capabilities that Apple started selling earlier this year as a way “to keep track of… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Privacy
Global Privacy Control Popularity Grows as Legal Status Up in Air
BloombergLaw: “Global Privacy Control, a way for consumers to signal privacy preferences to a host of websites without manually reaching out to each one, is gaining traction. A handful of internet browsers offer the tool, and California’s attorney general indicated the tool could be used to comply with the state’s privacy law. But its ability… Continue Reading
How Your Returns Are Used Against You at Best Buy, Other Retailers
WSJ [paywall – alternative free source] – “At Best Buy, returning too many items within a short time can hurt a person’s score, as can returning high-theft items such as digital cameras. Every time shoppers returns purchases to Best Buy, they are tracked by a company which has the power to override the store’s touted… Continue Reading
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, December 26, 2021
Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, December 26, 2021 – Privacy and security 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
DuckDuckGo Search Queries Grew 47% in 2021
Bleeping Computer: “The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo continues to grow rapidly, with the company now averaging over 100 million daily search queries and growing by almost 47% in 2021. Unlike other search engines, DuckDuckGo says they do not track your searches or your behavior on other sites. Instead of building user profiles used to display interest-based ads,… Continue Reading
Email is an awful online ID that we use for almost everything
Vox: “…Today, Gmail is the most popular email service in the world, which has created a seemingly limitless number of what I collectively refer to as the Other Sara Morrisons: people who share my name and who, for whatever reason, enter my Gmail address when they mean to use their own. Their frequent invasions of… Continue Reading
WhoWhatWhy’s Best Government Integrity Stories of 2021
“This year, WhoWhatWhy launched a Government Integrity unit to dig into the powerful but poorly monitored functions of the permanent government: health and interior departments and regulatory agencies in Washington and across the country. Here are some of our favorite stories from that new team…” Continue Reading
Americans widely distrust Facebook, TikTok and Instagram with their data
Washington Post: “…It’s the rare thing that Americans of all ages and across the political spectrum largely seem to agree on: They don’t trust social media services with their information and they view targeted ads as annoying and invasive, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll. Many Americans use social media — and most use… Continue Reading
How to Know When Your iPhone Could Be Recording You
Lifehacker: “You’ve probably had the (legitimate) fear that your smartphone is listening or watching you. Your iPhone certainly isn’t without privacy risks, and you should absolutely audit your settings and all of your app permissions, but one helpful feature that Apple has built in is a visual warning when your device is queued up to… Continue Reading
Four Resolutions for a Healthier Tech Life in 2022
The New York Times: “The coronavirus pandemic has been packed with plenty of nasty tech surprises. We ran into the problem of a perpetual scarcity of hardware, like game consoles and graphics cards. Apple this year announced a major change to its data practices, including a tool to scan iPhones for child pornography, which critics… Continue Reading
How to use your phone’s privacy-protection tools
The New York Times: “Apple’s iOS 15 and Google’s Android 12 operating systems beefed up their privacy controls this year to give you more warnings — and options — when a site or service wants to use personal information like location or browser clicks. Concerned about how your data is being used by apps and… Continue Reading
Stop Google tracking for good by changing these settings
CNET – “If you are using any Google app, it’s likely you’re being tracked. Even if you turned off location history on your Google account, you’re not completely in the clear yet. While disabling that setting sounds like a one-and-done solution, some Google apps are still storing your location data. Just opening the Google Maps… Continue Reading
