During the Covid-19 pandemic we avoided most forms of person-to-person interaction unless absolutely necessary. That was deeply problematic for education, which is based on the idea of a teacher interacting…
Digital technology is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it makes vital tools like VPNs possible, providing strong and affordable privacy protection for personal data when in transit across…
Back in February, we noted on PIA blog that the growing excitement about large language models (LLMs), for example in the form of ChatGPT, overlooked the serious privacy dangers they…
One of the most insidious forms of surveillance carried out routinely by web sites and their advertisers involves tracking pixels. These are graphic elements that are just one pixel in…
Privacy concerns about the social media platform TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, are not new. We've been reporting on them on the PIA blog for several years. More…
Back in December 2021, we discussed the potential privacy risks of the metaverse on the PIA blog, the current term for what used to be called virtual reality. It might…
It was over five years ago that we first warned about an imminent invasion of “listening, eavesdropping, spying things” in the form of so-called “smart” speakers. The cosy term “smart”…
New US And EU Laws Bring Risks To Privacy The UK civil rights group Big Brother Watch has published a major new document about the UK government's surveillance of social…
The murky world of government spyware has never been the same after the Pegasus Project leaked in July 2021 a list of over 50,000 phone numbers believed to be people…
In December 2022, we discussed the leak of an important ruling by EU privacy regulators regarding Meta's micro-targeted advertising, a system entirely based on constant online surveillance. The two parts…