RESOURCES
Facial Recognition Deployed on Children at Hundreds of US Summer Camps
The Washington Post describes a parent whose phone "rings 10 times a day with notifications from the summer camp's facial-recognition service, which alerts him whenever…
America’s Elderly Seem More Screen-Obsessed Than the Young
Many parents and grandparents will grumble about today's screen-obsessed youth. Indeed, researchers find that millennials look at their phones more than 150 times a day;…
FBI seeks to monitor Facebook, oversee mass social media data collection
The FBI is planning to aggressively harvest information from Facebook and Twitter, a move which is likely to cause a clash between the agency and…
Facebook Paid Contractors to Transcribe Users’ Audio Chats
Facebook Inc. has been paying hundreds of outside contractors to transcribe clips of audio from users of its services, according to people with knowledge of…
Pentagon testing mass surveillance balloons across the US
The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal.…
You’re very easy to track down, even when your data has been anonymized
The most common way public agencies protect our identities is anonymization. This involves stripping out obviously identifiable things such as names, phone numbers, email addresses,…
How America’s Tech Giants Are Helping Build China’s Surveillance State
The OpenPower Foundation -- a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to "drive innovation" -- has set up a…
Can Google Ads Change Your Beliefs?
There are advertisers in the digital marketing industry who want to find out how effective this new form of social engineering is. One of those…
Amazon Alexa Keeps Your Data With No Expiration Date, and Shares It Too
If you have hangups about Amazon and privacy on its smart assistant, Alexa, you're not alone. Even after Amazon sent answers to a US senator…
A Researcher Attempted To Opt Out of Facial Recognition at the Airport — It Wasn’t Easy
The announcement came as we began to board. Last month, I was at Detroit's Metro Airport for a connecting flight to Southeast Asia. I listened…
Smartphones and Fitness Trackers Are Being Used To Gauge Employee Performance
The passive system incorporates an app known as PhoneAgent, which was developed by Prof. Andrew Campbell at New Hampshire's Dartmouth College. Using the smartphone's own…
When Myspace Was King, Employees Abused a Tool Called ‘Overlord’ to Spy on Users
During the social network's heyday, multiple Myspace employees abused an internal company tool to spy on users, in some cases including ex-partners, Motherboard reported on…
Google Chrome ‘Has Become Surveillance Software. It’s Time to Switch’
"You open your browser to look at the Web. Do you know who is looking back at you?" warns Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey A.…
Millions of Business Listings On Google Maps Are Fake — and Google Profits
Google's ubiquitous internet platform shapes what's real and what isn't for more than two billion monthly users. Yet Google Maps is overrun with millions of…
Bones are changing in surprising ways: Phone Use is To Blame, Research Suggests
New research in biomechanics suggests that young people are developing hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls -- bone spurs caused by the forward…
How Information is Like Snacks, Money, and Drugs To Your Brain
A new study by researchers at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business has found that information acts on the brain's dopamine-producing reward system in the…
New Deepfake Algorithm Allows You To Text-Edit the Words of a Speaker In a Video
It is now possible to take a talking-head style video, and add, delete or edit the speaker's words as simply as you'd edit text in…
Yahoo Japan Is Under Fire for Its China-Like Rating System
Some users of Yahoo Japan are rising up against Japan's biggest web portal after the rollout of a new rating system that's being compared with…
“Upgrade Your Memory With A Surgically Implanted Brain Chip”
In a five-year, $77 million project by the Department of Defense to create an implantable brain device that restores memory-generation capacity for people with traumatic…
Do Google and Facebook Threaten Our ‘Ambient Privacy’?
Until recently, ambient privacy was a simple fact of life. Recording something for posterity required making special arrangements, and most of our shared experience of…