Now is the time to defend the final haven for privacy: your brain
One of the principal concerns of privacy is to prevent others – typically governments or companies - from monitoring what we think. They have to do that indirectly, by spying…
Glyn Moody
Glyn Moody is a freelance journalist who writes and speaks about privacy, surveillance, digital rights, open source, copyright, patents and general policy issues involving digital technology. He started covering the business use of the Internet in 1994, and wrote the first mainstream feature about Linux, which appeared in Wired in August 1997. His book, "Rebel Code," is the first and only detailed history of the rise of open source, while his subsequent work, "The Digital Code of Life," explores bioinformatics - the intersection of computing with genomics.
Posts by GlynMoody:
Should apps share details of women’s menstruation and sex lives with Facebook and other sites? Some already do
Back in January, Privacy News Online wrote about some important research from Privacy International. It found that 61% of the Android apps it investigated automatically transfer data to Facebook the…
The next great platform shift is underway, and that could be really bad for privacy
The first computing era was based on the keyboard. Mainframes, minicomputers, personal computers – they were all controlled using fingers typing out commands. Later on, the graphical front end of…
Google says: “Privacy is paramount to us, in everything we do”; here’s why that can’t be true
Back in May Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed: the future is private". Now Google is joining in: Privacy is paramount to us, in everything we do. So today, we are announcing a…
A major security breach raises a key question: what happens when your biometric data is exfiltrated from a system?
It's no secret that password security is often terrible. Good passwords – ones that are long and include a mix of lower case, upper case, numbers, and special characters –…
The future of privacy is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed
William Gibson is best known for his book "Neuromancer", which popularized the word and concept of cyberspace. He also came up with the phrase "the future is already here —…
Arsenic in the water of democracy: UK police, politicians and privacy activists clash over facial recognition deployments
Last week's post looked at the increasing number of moves to rein in, or even ban, the use of facial recognition technologies in the US. Another country at the forefront…
Facial recognition concerns go mainstream in the US, as cities and companies bring in bans
Recently, FaceApp was much in the headlines. It allows users to submit photos of faces and modify them in interesting ways – making peple look older, or younger, or changing…
Eyes in the sky will soon see everything – even what happened in the past; is it too late to worry about privacy?
Earlier this year, Privacy News Online wrote about a new generation of nanosatellites that are starting to fill the sky. The same continuing advances in technology that have made these…
What can we learn from Palantir’s secret user manual for police users of its big data software?
Two years ago, Privacy News Online wrote about the mysterious Palantir Technologies. It describes itself as a company that makes "products for human-driven analysis of real-world data". It is a…