Privacy

Daniel Solove has published a fascinating paper in the Boston University Law Review examining the current approaches in privacy laws in the U.S. and E.U. and makes a good case for the notion of “consent” being a key flaw in both frameworks.

A few GDPR rulings have recently been handed down that are going to be causing major shakeups across a number of sites and services. This year’s off to a wild start.

Warren Ellis on limiting your availability for both productivity and OpSec: When you reply to this, it doesn’t go to my main email. It goes to a public-facing email account that I have to manually go to.

These days, encryption is more important than ever. You don’t need to look any farther than the national news for reasons why. Even small sites that don’t provide user accounts should consider it.

Ars Technica has successfully completed a public records request that allowed them to acquire 4.6 million records from the Oakland Police Department’s automated License Plate Reader (LPR) system. Using their custom built visualization tool, they are able to extrapolate a shocking amount of information about the travel patterns of individual vehicles.

Great article from Cory Doctorow on the conversations he’s had with his six year old daughter about mass surveillance. What’s particularly revealing is which concepts she intuitively grasps from her own experience with technology, and how that aligns with research done on the online habits of children.

This is an enormous win for OpenID, but it is also a huge risk if anything goes wrong with such a high-profile project. Obviously, it will all depend on the implementation, and if all goes well it will give OpenID the push it needs to increase the number of consumers as opposed to providers, which is a ratio that is sorely lopsided at the moment.