ACLU shares user data with Facebook and friends
The American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU or short, is a regular critic of Facebook for its many privacy failures over the years. Yet, a recent update to its privacy…
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Everything you wanted to know about “surveillance advertising” – and how to avoid it
In the four years since Privacy News Online first wrote about corporate surveillance as the principal business model for much of the Internet, the practice has become a mainstream concern.…
Clubhouse users are teaching each other how to stay private from Instagram
One of the first things that you hear to do on Clubhouse is to add your Twitter and Instagram accounts to your Clubhouse profile for discoverability because otherwise there’s really…
The battle over the EU’s far-reaching ePrivacy Regulation enters its final and crucial stage
The EU's GDPR has had a massive effect on privacy worldwide. But as a post explained back in 2018, there's more EU privacy legislation coming through which could have a…
Time to get rid of pervasive online ad tracking once and for all: the alternative is simple, effective, and fully respects privacy
This blog has been pointing out for years the fundamental incompatibility between privacy and the current online advertising model. Today, most Web sites seek to gather as much personal information…
UK Police Chief falsely claims that end to end encrypted messaging “puts lives at risk”
The Metropolitan Police in the United Kingdom (UK) really really don’t want Facebook to bring end to end encryption to Facebook Messenger and Instagram. In fact, a police chief went…
Is the GDPR finally going to get some teeth?
The GDPR is a powerful, far-reaching piece of legislation, but one whose full potential the EU data protection authorities have so far failed to realize. Research from DLA Piper shows…
Today’s online advertising not only seriously harms privacy, but is seriously broken in other ways; we need to fix it
For three and half years now, Privacy News Online has been warning about the huge, and largely ignored, danger of micro-targeted ads and real-time bidding (RTB). The approach sounds plausible.…
The widening SolarWinds debacle shows why the reckless idea of backdooring encryption must be dropped forever
The SolarWinds hack is the most serious breach of governmental and corporate security in years, perhaps the most serious breach ever - at least among those that we know about.…
New report shows Google tracks 80% of the Web, with Amazon likely to overtake Facebook as second-worst privacy threat
It's no secret that practically every Web page we visit is infested with trackers. On its own, that would be bad enough. But most trackers are used in order to…