Terence Eden’s Blog
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· google privacy · 5 comments · 350 words · read ~245 times.
My good friend Jess wrote this a little while ago: The function of a system is its output. If you have dog grooming machine that sometimes smashes puppies and you keep running it, you're in the dog smashing business. If you work for a mass surveillance company that keeps enabling genocide and undermining democracy... — […]
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· privacy sport technology · 9 comments · 550 words · read ~139 times.
I don't follow football - or any sports - which made me an unusual choice for this particular pitch. Let's wind back the clock a decade... A relatively unknown hardware company has just released one of the first "fitness trackers" which can measure a wearer's physiology. As well as counting steps, it now has the […]
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· mastodon privacy · 1 comment · 600 words · read ~130 times.
One of the many great things about the Fediverse (Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, etc) is that your account is portable. Let's say you're bob@social.boring and, one day, you decide to move your account to foxyfun@furryextreme.yif. Well, with a few clicks of a button, all of your old followers are now following your brand new account. You're […]
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· advertising email privacy · 20 comments · 550 words · read ~10,265 times.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is a standards development group for the advertising industry. Their members love tracking users. They want to know where you are, who you're with, what you're buying, and what you think. All so they can convince you to spend slightly more on toothpaste. Or change your political opinions. Either way, […]
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· MSc NaBloPoMo privacy security · 23 comments · 350 words · read ~10,871 times.
As part of my MSc, I have to take an online exam. Obviously, this means I am highly likely to cheat by looking up things on Wikipedia or by having a bit of paper with notes on it. EVIL! So, the exam body requires me to install ProctorU. It's a service which lets someone watch […]
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· alexa Amazon privacy ux · 9 comments · 450 words · read ~4,233 times.
This morning, my wife noticed that Alexa was insistently flashing its little blue lights. "Alexa... Notifications?" "You have one notification. An item on your wishlist has dropped in price. The … is now only £…" And that's how my wife found out what I planned to get her for her birthday! What happened to cause […]
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· browsers HTML5 privacy security web · 8 comments · 300 words · read ~372 times.
A curious little data leak, but one I struggle to care about. Perhaps useful for a bit of fingerprinting? Websites can access your system's camera and microphone. That's how modern video conferencing works in the browser. In an effort to retain user privacy, the browser asks the user for permission to use the camera and […]
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· Book Review data privacy security · 1 comment · 350 words · read ~323 times.
Without your permission, or even your awareness, tech companies are harvesting your location, your likes, your habits, your relationships, your fears, your medical issues, and sharing it amongst themselves, as well as with governments and a multitude of data vultures. They're not just selling your data. They're selling the power to influence you and decide […]
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· NaBloPoMo Open Data privacy · 2 comments · 700 words · read ~213 times.
I'm an advocate for open data - both in my professional role and in a personal capacity. One of the hard things is succinctly explaining that "open data" means "non-personally identifiable data at a sufficient granularity to be useful without proving a risk to any individual's (or group's) reasonable expectations of privacy while still being […]
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· email gdpr privacy security · 3 comments · 400 words · read ~150 times.
Every so often, I get a glimpse into the thought processes of someone who has a very different view of the world to me. I don't deal with people's personal information often. So I was surprised to receive an email with a multi-megabyte spreadsheet called "Pay and Bonuses 2020". The email contained this doozy of […]
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