Category: Governments

Read government privacy and censorship news on the Privacy Online News blog from Private Internet Access VPN Service.

The USMCA, international trade and your digital rights

After months of negotiations and significant political tension, the United States, Canada and Mexico announced a new trade agreement earlier this week. The “new NAFTA” will be known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or the USMCA. In addition to other changes, the new deal includes a chapter on digital trade. While the USMCA will primarily … Continue reading “The USMCA, international trade and your digital rights”

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  • Sep 29, 2018 |
  • Glyn Moody |
  • Governments, News, Privacy,

Call for wide-ranging GDPR investigation into online ads, which could kill today’s real-time bidding system

Privacy News Online recently wrote about how the widely-used real-time bidding (RTB) system for online ads causes personal data to be spread widely among potential advertisers. We noted that one key proposal of the ePrivacy regulation, currently working its way through the EU legislative process, is to make it easy for people to opt out … Continue reading “Call for wide-ranging GDPR investigation into online ads, which could kill today’s real-time bidding system”

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  • Sep 22, 2018 |
  • Glyn Moody |
  • Governments, News, Privacy,

Top court rules UK mass interception of fiber-optic cable traffic violates the right to privacy: a victory, but how big?

Five years have passed since Edward Snowden’s revelations about the scale of surveillance by the US and UK shocked the world. Things have gone rather quiet on that front now, partly because there have been few new releases of documents from the Snowden hoard. But in the background, many privacy groups have been quietly working … Continue reading “Top court rules UK mass interception of fiber-optic cable traffic violates the right to privacy: a victory, but how big?”

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Vulnerability Acquisition Companies are Stockpiling 0-days and Selling Them to Governments Rather Than Allowing Them to be Patched

Last week, a so-called vulnerability acquisition company by the name of Zerodium disclosed a Tor Browser 0-day vulnerability to the public, in an apparent PR stunt. As you may know, 0-days are security bugs which have been discovered but not yet revealed to the developers responsible for patching. The 0-day disclosed by Zerodium was for … Continue reading “Vulnerability Acquisition Companies are Stockpiling 0-days and Selling Them to Governments Rather Than Allowing Them to be Patched”

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  • Sep 19, 2018 |
  • Derek Zimmer |
  • Copyright, Governments, News, Privacy,

Articles 11 and 13 in the New EU Copyright Directive Enable More Surveillance

Articles 11 and 13 in the New EU Copyright Directive are a Path to More Surveillance Privacy activists were caught off guard last week when the EU passed its controversial copyright legislation. The new law has far reaching consequences that technical experts and internet companies alike have strongly advised would damage EU businesses and change … Continue reading “Articles 11 and 13 in the New EU Copyright Directive Enable More Surveillance”

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  • Sep 15, 2018 |
  • Glyn Moody |
  • Governments, Networking, Privacy,

Here come connected vehicles and urban analytics: what do they mean for privacy?

Electric vehicles and driverless cars may get the headlines, but the real revolution on roads is happening elsewhere, silently and out of sight. For twenty years, more and more digital technology has been added to vehicles. Today, they have almost become computers that have wheels and engines. That’s been made possible in part by the … Continue reading “Here come connected vehicles and urban analytics: what do they mean for privacy?”

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  • Aug 25, 2018 |
  • Glyn Moody |
  • Governments, News, Privacy,

Beyond the GDPR: here comes the EU’s ePrivacy regulation – but not yet

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most important – and controversial – privacy law passed in recent years. Despite its origin in the EU, its reach is truly global, since it affects anyone storing the personal data of EU citizens, no matter where the organization is located. In part because of a flurry … Continue reading “Beyond the GDPR: here comes the EU’s ePrivacy regulation – but not yet”

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  • Aug 18, 2018 |
  • Glyn Moody |
  • Governments, News, Privacy, Programming, Security,

After call to implant microchips in people awaiting trial, are they about to become the next threat to our privacy?

Last year, Privacy News Online wrote about the Swedish SJ Railways allowing customers to use under-the-skin microchip implants for “easy” ticket purchases. That might have seemed a one-off bad idea, but such implants have a surprisingly long history. More worryingly, they seem to be gaining in popularity, and cropping up increasingly in everyday situations, with … Continue reading “After call to implant microchips in people awaiting trial, are they about to become the next threat to our privacy?”

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  • Aug 15, 2018 |
  • Derek Zimmer |
  • Governments, Networking, Privacy, Security,

TLS 1.3 is Coming – an Opportunity for Amazon, Google and Microsoft to End Censorship

A new standard for cryptography is on the horizon, called Transport Level Security 1.3 (TLS 1.3). TLS 1.3 is a major update to cryptography, and fundamentally changes how websites and services will handle negotiating and executing encrypted services. Among the big improvements are faster handshakes with websites (meaning faster page load times), new ciphers (new … Continue reading “TLS 1.3 is Coming – an Opportunity for Amazon, Google and Microsoft to End Censorship”

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  • Aug 11, 2018 |
  • Glyn Moody |
  • Governments, News, Privacy,

US politicians discover personally the pitfalls of facial recognition: is it time to ban it completely?

For all the theoretical concerns about the limitations of facial recognition systems, there’s nothing like personal experience to hammer the point home. That was confirmed recently when the ACLU ran an interesting experiment using Amazon’s cloud-based Rekognition system, which Privacy News Online discussed a couple of months back: Using Rekognition, we built a face database … Continue reading “US politicians discover personally the pitfalls of facial recognition: is it time to ban it completely?”

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