Your local supermarket may soon be as scary as Google or Facebook
What if there were no prices on anything in your local supermarket, because everything in the entire selection was priced individually just for you, and the food prices would vary…
Surveillance
Sweden doubles down on data retention surveillance, includes VPN surveillance in new leaked proposal
The Swedish government is doubling down on the court-banned and hated data retention surveillance. As a Western first, they're also planning to introduce VPN surveillance, taking a page out of…
Welcome to the Internet of listening, eavesdropping, spying things
There's a new frontier for digital privacy: home devices that understand spoken commands. That's impressive and convenient, but it comes with definite risks, as Rick Falkvinge pointed out earlier this…
IMSI Catching: Phone surveillance measures and countermeasures go mainstream
The German newspaper Die Zeit has a long feature today about IMSI catchers and their countermeasures, words that were long heard only in countersurveillance cultures at Black Hat and Defcon.…
Leak of proposed US law reveals plans for widespread use of multiple surveillance technologies at borders
Here on Privacy News Online, we often write about the impact on privacy of technologies such as facial recognition, iris scans, DNA databases, and drones. Individually, those powerful and rapidly-advancing…
If you use a browser extension, your full Internet history may be for sale – and easily de-anonymized
The recent repeal of broadband privacy protection in the US has highlighted the highly-personal nature of browsing histories. One natural solution is to use a VPN in order to shield…
Verizon’s newest rewards program, Verizon Up, encourages you to trade your internet privacy for coupons
Verizon's new rewards program, Verizon Up, lets mobile subscribers get rewards and coupons on their bill every time they spend $300 - if they voluntarily agree to enrolling in Verizon's…
Canada incentivizes mass surveillance with a mobile app called Carrot Rewards
The Canadian government is using carrots to lure in new helpers in its quest for mass surveillance powers. A new app called Carrot Rewards is a behavioral modification mobile app…
Our surveillance future: pervasive, continuous facial recognition from wandering robo-cars and hovering drones
Last month, Privacy News Online wrote about the first arrest by UK police using an automatic facial recognition system mounted on a vehicle to scan people in a crowd. But…
Untangling the other dark web – of pervasive, inescapable, corporate surveillance
Visitors to this site are well aware of how our every move is tracked as we move around the Internet. We know that companies are building minutely-detailed profiles of us,…