301–310 of 469 posts
The best part is where the author admits to using google analytics himself to track who visits his blog. At some point we all have to say enough is enough.
FWIW that isn’t a unique identifier for the author, it’s for Wacom’s GA account. I didn’t see any meaningful identifier being sent. Of course the set of most opened apps and your IP are probably enough to identify you. That said, yep, it seems lame they don’t disclose this tracking. I can understand why they’d want to know what apps their device pairs most often with, but tracking all app opens seems aggressive, but…
Pretty much every site you visit puts PII in the title, which the browser dutifully includes in it's title.
GSuite leaks my email address:
"Inbox - my.email@example.corp - Example Corp Mail - Mozilla Firefox"
Outlook leaks my email address, and subject lines of emails or meeting information:
"Inbox - my.email@example.corp - Outlook"
"EMBARGOED Friday 7th ::: Corp Revenue for 2019, +25% over expectations! - Mesage (HTML)"
"Meeting: Pre-Announcement, Dial-In +1 555 1234 ext 1234"
"page.html - corp-project-repo - Visual Studio Code"
It looks like everything in tech got poisoned, smart TVs taking screenshots, web apps tracking and matching user clicks, smartphones tracking locations realtime and who knows what else, desktop apps monitoring other apps and peripherals, creepy companies building profiles on everyone, health institutions selling data of their users... I want out, I didn't get into this field, keeping myself up-to-date and super capab…
It looks like everything in tech got poisoned, smart TVs taking screenshots, web apps tracking and matching user clicks, smartphones tracking locations realtime and who knows what else, desktop apps monitoring other apps and peripherals, creepy companies building profiles on everyone, health institutions selling data of their users... I want out, I didn't get into this field, keeping myself up-to-date and super capab…
The data collected has massive potential to improve medical research. Being able to validate database wide experiments on hundreds of millions of people at once is pretty incredible. There's likely to be a decade of insights to be found in this rapidly filling digital ocean of information.
In several years the clamour to get off the known web will empower a lot of security apps (not "privacy" apps, that are the opposite of their name) that are growing behind the scenes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing short of inquisition-style inspections of company servers, code, and networks is going to fix it on that front. We'll have to do some really radical invasions of company privacy before it results in more than fines-as-a-business-expense.
Not really, you just need to incentivise the behaviour. Pass a law to make it illegal to show ads based on tracking, with executive imprisonment for violations. Executives will then demand their teams to put controls in place to ensure that no one is using tracking to show ads. Violations of HIPAA have some serious fines, and I've watched executives at all levels take it VERY seriously
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich." Wow that last sentence really puts things into perspective. How can be reverse course and throw a wrench in the system? We are the makers, we should be able to wrestle back control and do it democratically and get politicians on our side to legislate this ad industry into the ground.
Here's a radical idea. Embrace that technology will bring everything to light and essentially destroy privacy. Instead, let's ensure the powerful people in our society also have no privacy. Let's ensure we can watch the watchers with more eyes than they watch us with.
This does not solve the problem, not even close.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wonder what the comfortable medium between privacy and letting developers get feedback about how well their code works is. I consider the nut of the problem to be informed consent. If you have user's informed consent to get the feedback, then there is no problem. If you don't, then the whole operation is unacceptable. And no, mentioning it in the privacy policy or terms of use don't count as "informed consent".
This would be a real challenge for some companies. Having a clear privacy policy creates a hard dependency between it and the code. And developers are notorious for not even being able to keep comments updated along with their code changes. It's not impossible at all, just in the current state of the industry there's a good reason we have vague agreements (also including good old-fashioned laziness, of course). It'd…
I'm actually pretty sympathetic to Wacom in this instance, more sympathetic than the blogpost author at least. But unethical actions are unethical regardless of whether acting ethically is "a real challenge" for some companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First step would be to kill advertising-based models. Get them banned. Because it's the advertising industry's race to the bottom that poisons everything, and fuels the creation of surveillance infrastructure. With ad-related snooping gone, it will be much easier to rein in the remaining few players who misuse data in pursuit of optimizing their business models. (And yes, I know ads enable a lot of free content on-li…
Nothing short of inquisition-style inspections of company servers, code, and networks is going to fix it on that front. We'll have to do some really radical invasions of company privacy before it results in more than fines-as-a-business-expense.