In the effort to protect our online transactions, have we ceded too much power to too few? Is Sift, whose algorithms protect corporate behemoths from McDonald’s to Twitter, merely a free-market version of China’s intrusive Sesame Score? What is the cost of safety? Online shopping may be pervasive, but it isn’t without risks. Credit card […]

There has been a lot of concern about an odd virus infecting Apple’s newest M1 devices. Under normal conditions viruses infect Apple products less than Windows. Red Canary who discovered Silver Sparrow, (why would you name a virus after a close relative of your company?) is still trying to understand it’s purpose. After having infected […]

COPPA—the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act—was supposed to help guard our kids’ privacy on the internet. More than two decades after its passage, the results are mixed. Yes, COPPA protects some kids, but it is too narrow in scope and needs to be updated. Congress enacted the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in 1998 to […]

The Council of the European Union, the European Commission and the European Parliament designed the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in an effort to protect people’s personal data and privacy when on a website. Through the GDPR, websites are now required to disclose to users that cookies will be used to track their digital footprint […]

There’s a recent article in the New York Times which reads a little nostalgic, but makes a good point. There’s no space left for smaller players in the consumer electronic space. Even given the innovation happening, smaller players get gobbled up quickly, and consumed into the huge data crunching consumer giants. Think fitbit… The other […]

The Internet has given us nearly unlimited access information of all kinds. We can learn about anything that interests us with a few clicks. So can our government, and when their topic of interest is your internet use, that’s a concern. The federal government’s primary tool for monitoring the Internet activity of U.S. citizens is […]

18 C0-op food stores decided to test a system targeting shop-lifters and violent store visitors using a product from Facewatch. Where’d they get that name? “In an open letter to the retailer, Privacy International questioned the legality of the technology in stores. It also asked whether information was being shared with the police.” Facial recognition […]

If this was even remotely possible… “The Commission said the guidelines require online platforms to identify the algorithmic parameters that determine ranking and to share them with companies.” I can imagine the wittier of the group responding with a single parameter, “result=”. Margrethe Vestager is becoming something of a star in the European Commission, The […]