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"The survey found that more than half of Americans say they do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened. Turow argues that marketers misrepresent Americans' behaviors by categorizing their acceptance of company discounts in exchange for personal data as rational acceptance of "tradeoffs."

"But Computercop isn't security software -- quite the opposite; it's classic malware. The software, made in New York by a company that markets to law enforcement, is a badly designed keylogger that stores thingstyped into the keyboard -- potentially everything typed on the family PC -- passwords, sensitive communications, banking logins, and more, all stored on the hard drive, either in the clear, or with weak, easily broken encryption. And Computercop users are encouraged to configure the software to email dumps from the keylogger to their accounts (to spy on their children's activity), so that all those keystrokes are vulnerable to interception by anyone between your computer and your email server. "

"Graduated top of your class in Ghana and managed to land a place on an MBA at Oxford? Then you're heading for a salary high enough to make repaying your student loan a cinch - especially if half your Facebook followers are from McKinsey. At least, this is the kind of calculation being made by private funders stepping into the increasingly complex and competitive student loans market."

"Combined with Apple's previous steps, the private relay feature "will effectively render IP addresses useless as a fingerprinting mechanism," Charles Farina, head of innovation at digital marketing firm Adswerve, told Reuters. It would also prevent advertisers from using IP addresses to pinpoint a person's location, he said."

"Surrendering our privacy to the government would be foolish enough. But what is more insidious is the Faustian bargain made with the marketing industry, which turns every location ping into currency as it is bought and sold in the marketplace of surveillance advertising. Now, one year later, we're in a very similar position. But it's far worse. A source has provided another data set, this time following the smartphones of thousands of Trump supporters, rioters and passers-by in Washington, D.C., on January 6, as Donald Trump's political rally turned into a violent insurrection. At least five people died because of the riot at the Capitol. Key to bringing the mob to justice has been the event's digital detritus: location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing."

"Remote surveillance software like Sneek, also known as "tattleware" or "bossware", represented something of a niche market pre-Covid. But that all changed in March 2020, as employers scrambled to pull together work-from-home policies out of thin air. In April last year, Google queries for "remote monitoring" were up 212% year-on-year; by April this year, they'd continued to surge by another 243%."

"I can't believe this has to be said (again), but cyberpunk was meant as a warning, not a business plan. It turns out that you need very few identifiers to make a guess about who a person standing in front of a billboard is, especially when you can suck data out of their phones. Throw in data about how long you stand in front of a billboard and you've got metrics that advertisers can use to tune their campaigns."

"The new feature, part of a wider set of tools covering "off-Facebook activity", will not delete anything from Facebook's servers, instead simply "disconnecting" data from an individual user's account."