We are living through the golden age of scams right now, so I’m going to do an ongoing series about coronavirus crimes. First up: My conversation with Grace Brombach, who just wrote a report on scams(PDF) for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. You can hear my conversation with Brombach [Keep reading]
Amy Boyer, I sometimes say, was the first person murdered by the Internet. Twenty years ago this fall, she was gunned down in cold blood by stalker Liam Youens. He found Amy by hiring a data broker, and told everyone about that on his website. “It’s actually obscene what you [Keep reading]
Dan Solove, perhaps the leading legal scholar on privacy, has an amazing collection of magazine covers on his TechPrivacy.com website. One after another, they all lament that “Privacy is Dead.” The stories date from 2015….2010…1994…..1970! He calls this collection “the undying death of privacy.” “I am growing weary of [Keep reading]
The third episode of our privacy podcast, No Place to Hide, goes right to a pretty dark place. When they take away our privacy, what are they really taking away? Our humanity. Menny Barzily, CTO of the Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center at Tel-Aviv University, offered the most profound analysis. He [Keep reading]
Peer-to-peer payment app Venmo has long told users not to use the service to pay strangers for goods or services. That appears to be changing. The service has quietly added a feature it’s calling the “Venmo Purchase Program.” For a hefty, optional 3% non-refundable fee, which can be added on [Keep reading]
Erin and her son Noah think they’ve finally found a safe place to live, in a quiet Ohio town, invisible to Erin’s abusive ex-husband. But that life is shattered by a disturbing voice mail after a single photo of Noah accidentally appears on a school website. The call sends [Keep reading]
Erin and Noah, on the run from Erin’s abusive ex-husband, make their way from Ohio to Missouri as they search for a safe place to spend the night after a near-disaster that morning at Noah’s school. Even simple tasks like shutting off Internet service are dangerous and mind-numbingly frustrating. That’s [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan