Privacy Blog

"Friends don’t let friends get spied on.' – Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation and longtime advocate of privacy in technology.

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Are Encrypted Messaging Apps Really Secure?

Here is a quote from Pierluigi Paganini in an article published in the Cybernews.com web site: “Signal: the most secure messaging app? “The messaging app that is considered most secure by privacy advocates and whistleblowers is, without any doubts, Signal. “It implements end-to-end encryption and its source code is open source allowing for auditing. The application allows messages to “disappear” after a certain period of time has elapsed and unlike […]

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One Way to Prevent Police From Surveilling Your Phone

Here is an interesting article: https://theintercept.com/2020/09/25/surveillance-sim-cloning-protests-protect-phone/ I have 2 other suggestions: Leave your phone at home. Use an Apple iPod touch instead of a cell phone as it doesn’t have a SIM card and is nearly impossible to wire-tap or even detect by normal methods (see the previous article, The Most Secure Way to Communicate? An iPod Touch, at https://privacyblog.com/2015/08/20/the-most-secure-way-to-communicate-an-ipod-touch/. The primary drawback is that the iPod touch can only […]

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Facebook Warns Privacy Rules Could Force It to Exit European Market

Facebook has warned that it could be forced to pull out of the European market if European regulators push forward with limits on data sharing between the European Union and the United States. Until this year, an arrangement called Privacy Shield allowed US technology companies to move data easily between the two jurisdictions. But Europe’s highest court nixed that arrangement in July, arguing that US law lacks robust protections against […]

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Senate’s Encryption Backdoor Bill is ‘Dangerous for Americans

A Senate bill that would compel tech companies to build backdoors to allow law enforcement access to encrypted devices and data would be “very dangerous” for Americans, said a leading House Democrat. Law enforcement frequently spars with tech companies over their use of strong encryption, which protects user data from hackers and theft, but the government says makes it harder to catch criminals accused of serious crime. Tech companies like […]

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Electronic Frontier Foundation Calls out Coinbase on Privacy

In at least one key way, cryptocurrency exchanges are exactly like banks: Americans who use them can have their information turned over to government agencies without a warrant. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a privacy-centric civil liberties group, has had enough of that, so it’s looking for cryptocurrency exchanges—whose users often prize crypto’s anonymity and censorship-resistance—to push back. You can learn more in an article by Jeff Benson in the […]

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California’s Landmark Privacy Law is Facebook’s Next ‘Nightmare’

I would consider this to be good news even though privacy-invasive Facebook considers it to be a nightmare: online corporations are now legally required (in some jurisdictions) to preserve customer privacy! The California Consumer Protection Act, or CCPA, is considered the nation’s first true data-privacy law and among the strongest aimed at the digital economy. Consumer advocates say it could usher in more state laws that hold the likes of […]

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New Attack Lets Hackers Decrypt VoLTE Encryption to Spy on Phone Calls

The attack doesn’t exploit any flaw in the Voice over LTE (VoLTE) protocol; instead, it leverages weak implementation of the LTE mobile network by most telecommunication providers in practice, allowing an attacker to eavesdrop on the encrypted phone calls made by targeted victims. Details may be found in an article by Swati Khandelwal in The Hacker News web site at: https://thehackernews.com/2020/08/a-team-of-academic-researcherswho.html. The fix? Turn your cell phone off until your […]

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How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices

From an article by Arielle Pardes and published in the Wired website: “In 2010, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was fed up with Facebook’s pushy interface. The platform had a way of coercing people into giving up more and more of their privacy. The question was, what to call that coercion? Zuckermining? Facebaiting? Was it a Zuckerpunch? The name that eventually stuck: Privacy Zuckering, or when “you are tricked into publicly […]

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