Category Archives: privacy

cookies don’t track people. people track people.

Posted on February 19, 2012 by ben

The news shows are in a tizzy: Google violated your privacy again [CBS, CNN] by circumventing Safari’s built-in tracking protection mechanism. It’s great to see a renewed public focus on privacy, but, in this case, I think this is the … Continue reading →

Posted in privacy, web | 4 Comments

encryption is (mostly) not magic

Posted on December 21, 2011 by ben

A few months ago, Sony’s Playstation Network got hacked. Millions of accounts were breached, leaking physical addresses and passwords. Sony admitted that their data was “not encrypted.” Around the same time, researchers discovered that Dropbox stores user files “unencrypted.” Dozens … Continue reading →

Posted in crypto, mozilla, privacy, security, web | 14 Comments

and the laws of physics changed

Posted on July 3, 2011 by ben

Google just introduced Google Plus, their take on social networking. Unsurprisingly, Arvind has one of the first great reviews of its most important feature, Circles. Google Circles effectively let you map all the complexities of real-world privacy into your online … Continue reading →

Posted in identity, privacy, web | 6 Comments

with great power…

Posted on June 12, 2011 by ben

When Arvind writes something, I tend to wait until I have a quiet moment to read it, because it usually packs a particularly high signal to noise ratio. His latest post In Silicon Valley, Great Power but No Responsibility, is … Continue reading →

Posted in policy, privacy | 7 Comments

(your) information wants to be free

Posted on April 28, 2011 by ben

A couple of weeks ago, Epsilon, an email marketing firm, was breached. If you are a customer of Tivo, Best Buy, Target, The College Board, Walgreens, etc., that means your name and email address were accessed by some attacker. You … Continue reading →

Posted in data, privacy, security | 9 Comments

grab the pitchforks!… again

Posted on April 19, 2011 by ben

I’m fascinated with how quickly people have reached for the pitchforks recently when the slightest whiff of a privacy/security violation occurs. Last week, a few interesting security tidbits came to light regarding Dropbox, the increasingly popular cloud-based file storage and … Continue reading →

Posted in crypto, data, privacy, web | 10 Comments

degrees of trust: software vs. data hosts

Posted on March 16, 2011 by ben

Overjoyed by all the SSL goodness around me (Twitter offers SSL-only as an option, so does Facebook, Google offers 2-factor auth), I started dutifully upgrading my web browsing experience on Firefox, specifically installing the EFF Add-On that turns on HTTPS … Continue reading →

Posted in privacy, web | 5 Comments

the difference between privacy and security

Posted on January 26, 2011 by ben

Facebook today rolled out new security features, both of which are awesome: SSL everywhere, and social re-authentication. True, SSL everywhere should probably be a default, even though I continue to believe that the cost is significantly underestimated by many privacy … Continue reading →

Posted in privacy, security, web | 5 Comments

Facebook, the Control Revolution, and the Failure of Applied Modern Cryptography

Posted on January 14, 2011 by ben

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was widely assumed by most tech writers and thinkers, myself included, that the Internet was a “Control Revolution” (to use the words of Andrew Shapiro, author of a book with that very … Continue reading →

Posted in crypto, privacy, web | 9 Comments

privacy icons

Posted on December 27, 2010 by ben

Aza Raskin has posted alpha 1 of the proposed Mozilla Privacy Icons. I was at the Mozilla-sponsored get-together where this was first discussed, and I’m really happy to see this moving forward. A few quick thoughts: the least useful of … Continue reading →

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