privacy

by John Mason for The Saker blog The Internet is an awesome place filled with knowledge and ideas. It lets us access information anywhere and lets us connect with friends

In recent months controversies have erupted over various tech companies contracting with the various law enforcement and military agencies. At Google, employees publicly expressed their distaste for the company’s contract to provide the U.S. Department of Defense with Artificial Intelligence technology. The frustration was so high that some Google employees actually quit.

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company, more familiarly known as AT&T, has a network that is one of the most robust in the world. Even before the age of the Internet, this company managed to carry voice and data communications across the United States from any point to any other point.

In a decision that digital rights advocates called “a groundbreaking victory for Americans’ privacy rights,” the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday that police generally must obtain a warrant before collecting cellphone records that can be used to track a person’s movements.

“The government can no longer claim that just using technology like your cellphones means you’ve given up your Fourth Amendment rights,” says the ACLU. “This is huge.”  (CD) — In a decision that digital rights advocates called “a groundbreaking victory for Americans’ privacy rights,” the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday that police generally must obtain a […]

Facebook provided at least four Chinese electronics companies, including government-linked telecom giant Huawei, unrestricted access to user data, according to a person familiar with the matter but not authorized to speak on the record.

At least one member of Congress regarded new information about Facebook’s data-sharing partnerships with tech companies as evidence that the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, lied to lawmakers in April about the control users have over their information on the social media platform.

Privacy: In a series of posts on this blog, we have shown how practically everything our parents took for granted with regards to privacy has been completely eliminated for our children, just because they use digital tools instead of analog, and the people interpreting the laws are saying that privacy only applies to the old, analog environment of our parents.

21st Century Wire says…

Europe: Slack has updated its Terms of Service to let your manager read your private conversations in private channels. Our analog parents would have been shocked and horrified at the very idea that their bosses would open packages and read personal messages that were addressed to them. For our digital children, it’s another shrugworthy part of everyday life.
The analog plain old telephone system, sometimes abbreviated POTS, is a good template for how things should be even in the digital world. This is something that lawmakers got mostly right in the old analog world.