The Internet of Things is Surveillance
The IOT is back in the news again this week. A judge has ordered Amazon to turn over audio data from an Alexa device related to a murder investigation. There's…
Cybersecurity
Why are people so poor at making privacy choices? What can be done about it?
Privacy News Online explores a rich mix of information about privacy. Things like threats to privacy, privacy wins, ways to enhance privacy. One common thread is how bad people are…
SuperCooKey – A SuperCookie Built Into TLS 1.2 and 1.3
In doing my research around the impact of TLS 1.3 for Private Internet Access, I came across some peculiar items in the new standards. TLS 1.3 represents a relatively large…
Why surveillance is even worse for your privacy than you thought: three cautionary tales
Readers of this blog hardly need to be told that surveillance represents a grave threat to privacy. By its very nature, it seeks to know who we are and what…
Quantum Computing – Is the World of a Secure Internet Over?
The short answer: No. The long answer: Noooooooooooo. If you haven't had a primer on what a quantum computer is or does, Kurzgesagt has a fantastic crash course introduction here:…
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…
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…
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…