November 27, 2023 Smart City Blues City governments are relying more and more on a vast network of sensors to tell them what’s going on: stop light cameras, gunshot detectors,…
September 18, 2023 Your Face Belongs to Us When the New York Times broke the Clearview AI story in 2020, we suddenly had to face the reality that no one could truly…
August 28, 2023 Assessing Your Network Security In the third part of my series on securing your home network, we’ll assess your security and privacy vulnerabilities. In prior weeks, we’ve exhaustively…
May 15, 2023 Probing the Ministry of Truth In the book “1984” (published in 1949), George Orwell envisioned a Big Brother that would control the media and dictate what was “truth”. But…
May 1, 2023 STOPping Mass Surveillance There’s a big difference between mass surveillance and targeted surveillance based on a court-approved, limited-scope search warrant. But advances in technology have made warrant-less,…
May 16, 2022 Global Privacy Control When we surf the web today – on our computers or smartphones – we are mercilessly tracked. Marketing firms and data brokers are hoovering…
March 7, 2022 My De-Google Strategy As my de-Google project progresses, I realized that I skipped the most important step: reconnaissance. Before you can de-Google your life, you need to…
December 13, 2021 End Run Around Your Rights The rampant collection and sharing of personal data is not just a creepy nuisance. Surveillance capitalism has actually had seriously deleterious effects on society…
May 17, 2021 Protecting Intellectual Freedom (Part 2) What is Tor, exactly? How and why would I use it? And what the heck is a Tor node? In part 2 of my…
April 26, 2021 Hunting for Stingrays (Part 2) While law enforcement touts the benefits of cell site simulators, today we will talk about the negative impacts, as well. While the actual impacts…