Back in the heyday of the old Soviet Union, a phrase evolved to describe gullible western intellectuals who came to visit Russia and failed to notice the human and other costs of building a communist utopia. The phrase was “useful idiots” and it applied to a good many people who should have known better. I now propose…
When WhatsApp sold its giant messaging platform to Facebook for $22 billion, “I sold my users’ privacy,” one of the company’s co-founders said. WhatsApp founder Mike Acton has opened up about some of the moral struggles he has faced since selling the encrypted messaging app to Facebook, a company that makes money by collecting information on its users and selling that…
Just last week, the world’s leading snooping powers quietly and without notice issued a disturbing warning to tech giants, telling them to surrender unprecedented backdoor access to their citizens’ data. Not many people know this, but the United Kingdom has some of the most extreme spying powers in the developed world. At the end of…
Google is in the news (again) for creepy surveillance practices. Google, AP reported, is tracking your physical whereabouts even after you tell them to shut Location History off. Now Bloomberg reports they bought data about Mastercard transactions to link online ads with in-store purchases. These make for interesting stories, but the real story, not being…
If you’ve ever had the sneaking suspicion that your phone might be watching you, new research suggests you’re not being paranoid. Research scientists at Northwestern University in Boston spent a year trying to determine whether or not smartphone applications are secretly recording our private conversations to send personal data to advertisers. Fortunately, the researchers did…
A couple years ago, something strange happened. A friend and I were sitting at a bar, iPhones in pockets, discussing our recent trips in Japan and how we’d like to go back. The very next day, we both received pop-up ads on Facebook about cheap return flights to Tokyo. It seemed like just a spooky…
