Privacy Archives | Private Internet Access Blog

Oct 13, 2018 |
Glyn Moody |
News, Privacy, Security,

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 to grow strongly, admittedly from a small base: The worldwide smart speaker market grew 187% in Q2 2018, with shipments reaching 16.8 million units. Google … Continue reading “Amazon hopes to blanket your home and car with listening, eavesdropping Alexa devices”

Oct 10, 2018 |
Derek Zimmer |
Guides, Privacy, Security,

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 browsing looks like from a network perspective. Lightbeam looks at all of the network connections that your browser makes, and turns them into a visual … Continue reading “Firefox Lightbeam – Visually Seeing the Benefits of Privacy in Real Time”

Oct 7, 2018 |
Danica Sergison |
Copyright, Governments, News, Privacy,

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”

Oct 6, 2018 |
Glyn Moody |
News, Open Source, Privacy, Programming, Security,

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 million accounts compromised. A key issue is the highly centralized nature of today’s Internet, with power – and our personal data – concentrated in just … Continue reading “Tim Berners-Lee unveils next step for Solid, a decentralized Web platform with privacy built-in as standard”

Oct 4, 2018 |
Derek Zimmer |
Networking, Open Source, Privacy, Security,

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 types of blocking to your security and privacy arsenal, and it allows the user to fine tune each of these types of blocking to the … Continue reading “uMatrix – A Powerful Firefox Extension to Enhance Security and Privacy”

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”

Sep 25, 2018 |
Jayson Q. |
Guides, Privacy,

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 habits can (and Google say they’re not currently profiling people) be logged, even when not using Chrome. Chrome runs in the background because the next … Continue reading “How to stop Chrome running in the background”

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?”

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”

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?”