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

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Firefox Improves Privacy with History-Wiping ‘Forget’ Button and DuckDuckGo Search Support

Firefox version 33.1 adds a new button called “Forget,” which lets users wipe only their most recent browsing history and cookies. Users can choose to forget the last 5 minutes, 2 hours or 24 hours of activity, while preserving all history and cookies prior to that timeframe. Of course, Firefox has had a Private Browsing feature for some time that wipes all history and cookies once users close the private […]

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I2P: A Network More Secret than Tor

A new network has quietly been built in recent months that adds better security than even Tor. It gained some publicity this weekend when a replacement for the infamous Silk Road web site was announced. “Silk Road Reloaded” launched on Sunday, and is only accessible by downloading the special I2P software, or by configuring your computer in a certain way to connect to I2P web pages, called ‘eepsites’, and which […]

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New Documents Reveal Which Encryption Tools the NSA Couldn’t Crack

A report in Der Spiegel has shed new light on the NSA’s encryption-breaking programs, and put a spotlight on the handful of programs that are still giving them trouble. The findings, based on leaked documents, were also presented onstage at the Chaos Computer Club Conference in Hamburg by researcher Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras, who took the findings as a call to action. Reports describe “major problems” following users across […]

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The Amnesiac Incognito Live System (Tails)

Possibly the most secure of all available operating systems available today is Tails, an abbreviation for The Amnesiac Incognito Live System. If you are concerned about privacy of your email messages and also the ability to visit web sites without being tracked, you should become familiar with Tails. Luckily, that is easy to do. It boots on almost any Windows computer from a USB drive, DVD drive, or a SecureDigital […]

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Facebook to Face Privacy Violation Lawsuit over Scanning Users’ Messages to Target Ads

A judge in Oakland, California ruled on Tuesday that Facebook does indeed have to face a class action lawsuit charging that the social media firm violated user privacy when it scanned the contents of users’ messages for the purposes of targeting advertising to those users. The suit alleges that until October 2012, when the social network says it stopped the practice, it scanned the content of private messages sent between […]

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Will Google Sell All Your Email Messages To Your Grandchildren?

A fascinating article by Matt Novak states: “We now know that governments around the world are vacuuming up virtually everything that passes through the Internet. And we trust companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, VISA, and Amazon with all our personal information. We’re constantly asking what these companies are doing with our information today. But maybe the more important question is, what will these companies do with our data far into […]

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Privacy will be Considered a Luxury by 2025

Today’s notions of privacy will be eroded significantly within the next decade as growing reams of personal data are willingly exchanged for the convenience of living our lives online. That’s the prevailing view among the more than 2500 industry experts from around the world – including academics, legislators and staff at global companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo – who were quizzed on the future of privacy and security.

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