If you make a product designed to help people protect their privacy, a shout-out from Edward Snowden is marketing gold. That’s what happened recently for the makers of Ghostery, a free Web browser plugin that shows users which companies are tracking their online habits. The tool, which lists third-party firms collecting [Keep reading]
Friend, brilliant reporter, true believer and now NY Times best-selling author Julia Angwin has a thrilling book out explaining the real-life consequences of privacy erosion, and her own personal journey in escaping Eyes in the Sky. She’s been good enough to provide me with a free excerpt, which I’ve broken [Keep reading]
Would you take out a loan from the company you work for? Plenty of new lenders are betting that you might. But even if you wouldn’t, a new crop of lending products is bound to impact your privacy. The National Consumer Law Center released a report recently called “Big Data: [Keep reading]
If you are really concerned about privacy, then you probably shouldn’t use Facebook. But if you are like a billion people on the planet, you’ve decided that Facebook’s tradeoff between sharing and privacy is worth it. That’s certainly reasonable. Plenty of non-Facebookers today complain that they miss out on a lot [Keep reading]
It’s the first nice Friday in about five months on the East Coast, and I just walked across a busy street and passed a mom pushing her 2 or 3 year old in a stroller, the child playing with the mom’s iPhone all the way. At least they were crossing [Keep reading]
If and when consumers begin receiving credit cards with embedded chips en masse from their banks, it’ll mark a significant change in the way Americans pay for things. Visa’s Chief Risk Officer, Ellen Richey, told me in an exclusive interview recently that for many consumers, the only change will be [Keep reading]
I talked to a friend recently who was surprised how popular get-out-of-debt stories are. He pays all his bills every month on time and can’t imagine not doing that. Lucky is he. And perhaps a bit naive. Not only do roughly half of credit card carry a balance, but plenty [Keep reading]
As you are racing to fill out your tournament brackets today (and remember, don’t fall for the Quicken/Buffett ploy!), I have one piece of iron-clad, scientific advice to give you: Pick Duke to under-perform its tournament seeding. Duke is much more likely to bow out of the tournament early than [Keep reading]
(Kevin Hurley, Global Brand Ambassador for Teeling Whiskey, stopped by Peter Dillon’s in NYC last night to help me explain why the history of whiskey is the history of Ireland. Teeling, a new entrant, is meant to be sipped, not gulped, like Jameson. But it’s not quite as expensive as [Keep reading]
How often do I get to combine my favorite topics — consumer behavior, beer, hockey, and ripoffs — in the same story! Hockey fans (of course, hockey fans) in Idaho have sued a minor league team for using differently-shaped but equal volume plastic cups for their small ($4) and large [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan