There are many ups and downs about improvements in technology. We have, undoubtedly, become more enamoured with its ability to make our lives easier, and more informed in ways we never thought possible. Everything has been digitized, and there are so many forms of communication, it’s no wonder the home telephone has collected dust. People…
Growing popularity of voice activated technology in smartphones and home automation devices means that many Americans are never more than a few feet from a device capable of recording conversations they may assume are private. But a warrant recently obtained by police in Arkansas should serve as a reminder that Americans are willingly bugging their…
When you think of North Korea, the first thing that springs to mind is probably not a well-featured tablet PC. But that’s just what researchers at the Chaos Communication Congress hacking festival revealed on Tuesday. Called Woolim, this tablet is designed to limit the distribution of contraband media, track its users, and generally act as…
Apple emerged as a guardian of user privacy this year after fighting FBI demands to help crack into San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone. The company has gone to great lengths to secure customer data in recent years, by implementing better encryption for all phones and refusing to undermine that encryption. But private information still escapes from Apple…
Dystopian corporate surveillance threats today come at us from all directions. Companies offer “always-on” devices that listen for our voice commands, and marketers follow us around the web to create personalized user profiles so they can (maybe) show us ads we’ll actually click. Now marketers have been experimenting with combining those web-based and audio approaches to track consumers…
Australia may become the first country in the world to microchip its public. NBC news predicted that all Americans would be microchipped by 2017, but it seems Australia may have already beaten them to it. Back in 2010, CBS news reported that the Australian government had a potential RFID microchipping plan in the works related…
