As most people know from bitter personal experience, one of the most tiresome aspects of moving around the web is the constant barrage of pop-ups, asking whether the user agrees…
Back in June 2021, this blog noted that there were two important proposals for new laws moving their way through the European Union's legislative system. One, the Digital Services Act…
Peter Steiner's cartoon "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is The New Yorker's most reprinted drawing since they first published it in 1993. Forget the expertly illustrated political sketches,…
Since Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be rebranded as Meta to emphasize a new focus on virtual reality (VR), it has been hard to avoid hearing about the "metaverse".…
On December 9, 2021, a zero-day vulnerability was disclosed in the open-source Apache library in one of its Java-logging frameworks – Log4j 2, with the vulnerability being named “Log4Shell”. Cybersecurity agencies around the world are correctly calling this a massive,…
Warning: This post contains uncomfortable levels of personal information. My name is David Rutland. I’m the managing editor of PIA's blog, and I suppose this is as good an introduction…
The privacy campaigner Max Schrems has been doggedly fighting to force Facebook to respect EU users' privacy for nearly a decade now. As this blog has reported, there have been…
Recently, this blog explored the allegations by 17 US states that Google had abused its monopoly power to stifle competition, and delayed the EU's ePrivacy legislation. Hard on its heels…
Back in December last year, Texas and nine other US states sued Google alleging that the company enjoys monopolistic power, and that it is stifling competition. Google called this a…
It has been clear for years that the widespread use of micro-targeted advertising and real-time bidding represents a huge threat to online privacy. Fortunately, an alternative approach is already to…