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.

Online Privacy & Security

1 Comment

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 […]

Continue Reading →

Leave a comment

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 […]

Continue Reading →

Leave a comment

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 […]

Continue Reading →

Leave a comment

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 […]

Continue Reading →

Leave a comment

Over a Billion Android Devices Are at Risk of Data Theft

A billion or more Android devices are vulnerable to hacks that can turn them into spying tools by exploiting more than 400 vulnerabilities in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip, researchers reported this week. The vulnerabilities can be exploited when a target downloads a video or other content that’s rendered by the chip. Targets can also be attacked by installing malicious apps that require no permissions at all. From there, attackers can monitor […]

Continue Reading →

Leave a comment

Hundreds of Apps Have Hidden Tracking Software Used by the US Government

A new report exposes how a federal contractor secretly puts government tracking software into hundreds of mobile apps. The data gleaned from this tracking is then sold back to the US government for undisclosed purposes. This tactic is deceptive because the tracking isn’t disclosed. However, it appears to be totally legal. Details may be found in an article by C. Scott Brown in the Android Authority web site at https://www.androidauthority.com/government-tracking-apps-1145989/. […]

Continue Reading →

Leave a comment

Why a Data Breach at a Genealogy Site Has Privacy Experts Worried

From an article by Heather Murphy and published in the New York Times: “GEDmatch, a longstanding family history site containing around 1.4 million people’s genetic information, had experienced a data breach. The peculiar matches were not new uploads but rather the result of two back-to-back hacks, which overrode existing user settings, according to Brett Williams, the chief executive of Verogen, a forensic company that has owned GEDmatch since December.” Also: […]

Continue Reading →