privacy

A federal judge indicated on Thursday that she will approve a preliminary settlement between Google and users whose email content was scanned for advertising purposes.
“I intend to grant preliminary approval for the settlement in this case,” U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh during a hearing Thursday afternoon.
At the heart of the case is Google’s practice of intercepting emails sent to Gmail customers, and scanning the content of those emails for two purposes — weeding out spam content and for targeted advertising.

Privacy: Hardware maker Sonos has a new privacy policy, and is telling users that unless they agree to it, their devices may cease to function entirely. Of course, since people bought these objects, they’re those people’s property. And since Sonos is taking an action that they know will break these devices, Sonos is effectively saying they’ll willfully destroy your property unless you comply and give up your privacy. This is a new low.

Activism: The German newspaper Die Zeit has a long feature this week about IMSI catchers and their countermeasures, words that were long heard only in countersurveillance cultures at Black Hat and Defcon.

While Google’s Information Age dominance has long been recognized to have some unsavory consequences, the massive technology corporation has, in recent months, taken to directly censoring content and traffic to a variety of independent media outlets across the political spectrum — essentially muting the voices of any site or author who does not toe the establishment line.

Police in the “Empire State” of New York have reportedly proposed the implementation of a new device that would be able to detect when drivers are using their cell phones. The device has become known as the “textalyzer,” and although it will not be ready for several months, New York drivers can likely expect to have their cell phone usage monitored to a degree that drivers have never experienced before.

You Consume Fear: Then You are What you Eat!
Endless ignorance, presaged by fear, hate, suspicion, paranoia, misanthropy, and then all galvanized to the constructions of neutering culture of consumerism.

EDRi on EU public consultations on Internet and Big Brother issues: Public consultations are an opportunity to influence policy-making at an early stage, and to help to shape a brighter future for your digital rights. Below you can find the public consultations which EDRi finds relevant in 2017. (…) We will update the list on […]

A society without rulebreakers doesn’t challenge the rules, the status quo, the established consensus. Yet again, as our society pretends to celebrate its entrepreneurs, its freethinkers, and its trailblazers. But in action, in decree, and in enforcement, today’s societies passionately hate its square pegs in the round holes, its challengers, and its troublemakers — yes, those very same people as it pretends to cherish. It does everything it can to preserve the beautiful present. The one component required for the troublemakers to break out of their cages is privacy.

Over the past couple of years, Roombas haven’t just been picking up dust and chauffeuring cats around, they’ve also been mapping the layout of your home. Now, Colin Angle, the chief executive of Roomba maker iRobot, has said he wants to share the data from these maps in order to improve the future of smart home technology.

The Verge: Roombas have been busy mapping our homes, and now that data could be shared »

It’s going to be much harder to view the full web in Russia before the year is out. President Putin has signed a law that, as of November 1st, bans technology which lets you access banned websites, including virtual private networks and proxies. Internet providers will have to block websites hosting these tools. The measure is ostensibly meant to curb extremist content, but that’s just pretext — this is really about preventing Russians from seeing content that might be critical of Putin, not to mention communicating in secret.