“I think we’re alone now/There doesn’t seem to be anyone around.” You probably already have the tune in your head. It’s a 60s song that sounds like a 50s song that became an 80s hit because…the idea behind it is timeless. When young lovers finally get to steal a moment [Keep reading]
There’s been a lot of yelling about equal pay in the news lately. It’s a discussion I’d rather not wade deeply into, because boiling national labor data down to a single data point is the place where logic goes to die. Everyone knows there’s a long history of pay discrimination [Keep reading]
Something has gone horribly wrong with AOL email, and here’s what you need to know. 1) If you get an email from an AOL.com email address, treat it as toxic – even if it appears to comes from a friend. 2) If you have, or had, and AOL email account, [Keep reading]
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]
Bob Sullivan