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]
Edward Snowden’s coming out party at the SXSW conference on Monday was largely a geekfest, with most discussion focused on what technology firms should do to allow consumers snoop-free communications. You can review the discussion in plenty of places if you like, but I suspect if you care about those [Keep reading]
Beginning tonight and into tomorrow, thousands of Americans will celebrate the National Day of Unplugging. They’ll attend music festivals where cell phones must be checked at the door. They will go on walks. They will talk to each other! You should try it to. If not for a day, then [Keep reading]
Now that Glenn Greenwald has launched First Look and Ed Snowden is….live online, I have some advice for the two men who desperately want to make sure U.S. government digital surveillance doesn’t slip from the headlines. Let’s get right to the point. Please search that treasure trove of documents you [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan