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.
Most people are aware of the recent rise of China as an economic, political and military superpower. Less well known is China's massive infrastructure program known as the Belt and…
At the beginning of last year, concerns about facial recognition technology increased with the appearance of the start-up Clearview AI. It was problematic for two main reasons. First, the size…
By now, many people will have heard about the appearance of 533,000,000 Facebook records online, first revealed in a tweet by Alon Gal at the weekend. You can find out…
WiFi can be traced back to 1991, but it was in the late 1990s that the technology began to be taken up by the general public. Its success back then…
Privacy News Online frequently writes about surveillance conducted by governments on their populations, or by companies on their users. Less well-known is the connection between governments that wish to spy…
Workplace surveillance has become increasingly common since this blog first wrote about it back in 2017. One recent development is that it has moved into the home as more people…
In the four years since Privacy News Online first wrote about corporate surveillance as the principal business model for much of the Internet, the practice has become a mainstream concern.…
A couple of years ago, Privacy News Online wrote about the use by parents of ankle bracelets to track their childrens' whereabouts. That's a relatively rare application of the technology;…
Last month, this blog noted that the EU's important ePrivacy Regulation has now entered the final stretch of its legislative passage. An article on the Lawfare blog has spotted an…
Trying to detect welfare fraud, where people claim benefits they are not entitled to, is not new. Nor is it unreasonable: taxpayers rightly want to know that their money is…