Issue 92: Privacy Stories From 2014 Still Echo Today

Issue 92: Privacy Stories From 2014 Still Echo Today

Back again.
Thanks for the comments on the return of the newsletter.
I’ve heard that Microsoft Outlook isn’t playing nice with my email theme.
(It also isn’t playing fair…someone forwarded the newsletter back to me, and when I replied that person said the view of the newsletter in the reply looked fine in that same Microsoft Outlook.)
Until I get that fixed, remember that you can read the newsletter online — just follow one of the bullet point links below to get to it.
This week we’re going to pull through some privacy threads to the current day.
Eight years ago this week, I published a whole
DLTJ Thursday Threads
issue on privacy.
This was the lead paragraph:
Are you paranoid yet? Are you worried that
the secret you shared anonymously might come right back to you
? Or wondering why
advertisements seem to follow you around from web page to web page
? Or just creeped out by
internet-enabled services tracking your every move
? Or angry that
mobile carriers made it very easy for anyone to track every page you visited from your smartphone
? Or maybe you will
simply give up any personal information for a delicious cookie
? (Are you paranoid now?)
The first was about how posts on apps like YikYak, Secret, Whisper, and Snapchat weren’t really anonymous.
The second was about the kinds of data that apps collect and aggregate about us.
The third was an opinion piece about how Uber was tracking your every move as part of its experiments, and also contained a nugget about how Facebook was updating its terms of service to say explicitly that the app will now track your location.
The fourth was how AT&T and Verizon got caught invisibly rewriting web pages passing through their network to include their own tracking tokens.
And the fifth was a person-on-the-street test to see how much personal information passers-by would give up for a cookie (a tasty treat, not the browser cookie kind).
So with all that attention on privacy in 2014, you’d figure we’d have it all solved by now, right?
Let’s see what some of the latest stories are.
Algorithmic Creulty
Ditching CAPTCHAs
and
Improving Privacy
When Privacy is a National Security Concern
A Privacy-in-the-Cloud Good News Story
Facebook’s Luck Running Out in the European Union
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Algorithmic Cruelty
When I became pregnant, my partner and I, like many expectant individuals, opted not to tell our friends until after the first trimester. But I had an additional goal: for my friends to learn of my pregnancy before advertisers did. I’m a health-privacy scholar, so I know that pregnant individuals are of…