I received an unexpected email from a friend today with a Google doc attachment. It was a friendly note, so friendly that I did consider clicking on it — even with about 20 years experience watching all manner of hacker tricks. Fortunately, I stopped and asked a simple question, which [Keep reading]
Heartbleed is the latest guts-of-the-Internet calamity that you should know about, but can’t really do much about. In short, the very thing that was designed to keep Internet communications secure — part of the system that puts that little lock next to your web addresses on top of your browser [Keep reading]
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]
In the technology arms race between parents and children, kids have a new weapon: Yik Yak. A simple app for mobile devices, Yik Yak sets up temporary, anonymous chats among users who are near each other, based on GPS location. It’s less than four months old, but already, it’s causing [Keep reading]
Privacy is a funny thing. A lot of people are perfectly willing to take it away from other people, but get really angry when you take their privacy away. Like Sen. Diane Feinstein. She unleashed a torrent of criticism today against the CIA, accusing the agency of hacking computers than [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan