( Thinking... )

Protect your phone number and protect yourself. If a form on a website asks for it, think twice before typing it in. The more widely distributed your phone number is, the easier it is for companies to track your behavior online and serve up ads to you. And because your phone number is so closely tied to […]

Here’s a hard truth for parents: Big Tech knows more about your kids than you do.  Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter and so many more are vacuuming up countless bits of digital information about users. The details, when aggregated, paint a portrait of each person online that ordinary humans are unable to put together themselves. […]

Purchasing online with a little extra protection this holiday season makes a lot of sense. According to Marco Bellin, CEO of Privacy Parent, using a VPN and Private Browser might be the smartest gift to give. I stumbled on this article in “Women Love Tech” and they make a few really good points: 1) You […]

Power rests with those who have the most information, the most detailed information, and the most up-to-date information. Amazon’s public-policy department is an army of lobbyists swatting at and gutting any privacy legislation showing up on a state’s docket. The power Amazon has to manipulate outcomes is akin to manipulating the human genome, but on […]

Who really wants Facebook to capture data from our stylish Ray-Bans®? They’re currently recruiting developers and scientists to evaluate, manipulate, and dream about uses for ‘immersive’ data: data captured from a third party perspective. These videos, images, and sound watch what you’re doing and hopefully give some very smart people the ability to predict what […]

The recent 60minutes interview with Frances Haugen, a former data scientist at Facebook has the media classes in a bit of a frenzy. They’re tripping over themselves and repeating what we already know: “Facebook over and over again has shown it chooses profit over safety.” Haugen has lined up testimony in front of Congress, and […]

Since the stir about Apple’s invasive and hypocritical promotion of personal privacy, these stories about scanning cloud data for material which is deemed inappropriate, keep popping up. More and more users start to wonder: what exactly is happening to all my images, emails, pdfs, search traffic, etc. That’s a good thing. The pervasive sense that […]

There’s a great piece in the New York Times about Facebook’s tangle with it’s semi-independent data analytics tool, CrowdTangle. That tool was generating data which was driving some really bad press during the presidential election cycle. CrowdTangle is used by researchers, marketers, and journalists to evaluate and measure the engagement of specific Facebook content. Unfortunately […]