Group items tagged

"In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19b, and promised users that it wouldn't harvest their data and mix it with the surveillance troves it got from Facebook and Instagram. It lied. Years later, Facebook mixes data from all of its properties, mining it for data that ultimately helps advertisers, political campaigns and fraudsters find prospects for whatever they're peddling. Today, Facebook is in the process of acquiring Giphy, and while Giphy currently doesn't track users when they embed GIFs in messages, Facebook could start doing that anytime"

"The most effective of the existing bans on government face surveillance have crucial elements in common. They broadly define the technology, provide effective mechanisms for any community member to take legal enforcement action should the ordinance be violated, and limit the use of any information acquired in an inadvertent breach of the prohibition."

"Spyware apps were foisted on students at the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Today, long after most students have returned to in-person learning, those apps are still proliferating, and enabling an ever-expanding range of human rights abuses. In a recent Center for Democracy and Technology report, 81 percent of teachers said their schools use some form of this "student monitoring" spyware. Yet many of the spyware companies supplying these apps seem neither prepared nor concerned about the harms they are inflicting on students. "

"Some of those rules have had unintended consequences: a law meant to prevent piracy also prevents you from fixing your own car, using generic printer ink, or adapting your e-reader for your visual impairment. And a law meant to encourage innovation is routinely abused to remove critical commentary and new creativity."

"A new regime of interoperability can revitalize competition in the space, encourage innovation, and give users more agency over their data; it may also create new risks to user privacy and data security. This paper considers those risks and argues that they are outweighed by the benefits. New interoperability, done correctly, will not just foster competition, it can be a net benefit for user privacy rights."