Online privacy

[Commentary] Communities across the United States are considering strategies to protect residents’ access to information and their right to privacy.

[Commentary] The rules and incentive structures underlying how attention and surveillance work on the internet need to change. But in fairness to Facebook and Google and Twitter, while there’s a lot they could do better, the public outcry demanding that they fix all these problems is fundamentally mistaken. There are few solutions to the problems of digital discourse that don’t involve huge trade-offs—and those are not choices for Mark Zuckerberg alone to make. These are deeply political decisions.

The House of Representatives voted to extend the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program for six years with minimal changes, rejecting a yearslong effort by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to impose significant new privacy limits when it sweeps up Americans’ emails and other personal communications.  The vote, 256 to 164, centered on an expiring law that permits the government, without a warrant, to collect communications of foreigners abroad from United States firms like Google and AT&T — even when those targets are talking to Americans.

Internet advertising firms are losing hundreds of millions of dollars following the introduction of a new privacy feature from Apple that prevents users from being tracked around the web. Advertising technology firm Criteo, one of the largest in the industry, says that the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature for Safari, which holds 15% of the global browser market, is likely to cut its 2018 revenue by more than a fifth compared to projections made before ITP was announced.

Here's a fun question to pose at the family dinner table: have you ever heard of Alteryx? Whether you have or not, chances are good that it has heard of you. Alteryx is a data analytics company that makes its money by repackaging data that it has collected from different sources. And it became the latest reminder of how much data little-known companies have collected on us — and how little oversight there is over the security of that data. Data collection and analysis is a strong and growing multibillion dollar business, with thousands of firms.

 As cities have begun to collect and release unprecedented amounts of data, questions about citizen privacy have become increasingly relevant.

"In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.” It was 1968, and J.C.R. Licklider, a director at ARPA, had become convinced that humanity was on the cusp of a computing revolution. 

Consumer groups want the Federal Trade Commission and retailers to crack down on Interconnected toys and smartwatches to protect kids' privacy. 

In a letter sent to the Federal Communications Commission , 18 attorneys general from around the country called on the agency to delay the Dec 14 vote on a repeal of net neutrality protections. The 11th-hour letter, sent by the Oregon attorney general and signed by representatives of 17 states and DC, follows a high-profile press conference from the New York attorney general, who said the FCC had declined to investigate net neutrality comments posted under stolen identities.

As recently as the mid-2000s, email tracking was almost entirely unknown to the mainstream public. Then in 2006, an early tracking service called ReadNotify made waves when a lawsuit revealed that HP had used the product to trace the origins of a scandalous email that had leaked to the press. The intrusiveness (and simplicity) of the tactic came as something of a shock, even though newsletter services, salespeople, and marketers had long used email tracking to gather data.