The Security Usability Challenge
Everyone wants to be more secure. They want their browsing, their money, their utilities, and their lives to be as safe as possible. When you ask users of any service…
General Privacy News
Amazon hopes to blanket your home and car with listening, eavesdropping Alexa devices
Last year, Privacy News Online noted that there was a new frontier for digital privacy: home devices that understand spoken commands. Recent research from Canalys confirms that the market continues…
Firefox Lightbeam – Visually Seeing the Benefits of Privacy in Real Time
Back in our Firefox Hardening guide, we talked about installing the extension Firefox Lightbeam. What is Lightbeam? Lightbeam is an app that gives you a visual graph of what your…
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…
Tim Berners-Lee unveils next step for Solid, a decentralized Web platform with privacy built-in as standard
It's no secret that the current design of the World Wide Web has huge problems. This was shown most dramatically by the recent security breach at Facebook that saw 50…
uMatrix – A Powerful Firefox Extension to Enhance Security and Privacy
Today we are going to talk about uMatrix, a more powerful cousin of the uBlock Origin ad-blocker. uMatrix adds Cookie, CSS, Media/Image, Script, XML Http Requests (XHR), Frame, and other…
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…
Firefox Hardening Guide 2018
Purpose: This guide shows a user in an easy-to-follow way how to improve the privacy and security settings of Firefox, which, when combined with a privacy VPN, gives a user…
How to stop Chrome running in the background
With the changes to Chrome 69 (Chrome 69.0.3497.81 to be precise), Google pushed out a change which stealthily signs you into the Chrome application. This means that all your browsing…
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,…