Entrepreneur, Philosopher
Every country is going to regulate tech —and they’re not going to do it in the same way the US is; nor do they necessarily care what the US does. The EU is well down this path, as I’ve written before. A lot of that regulation is about protecting user privacy. Apple announced a bunch of … Continue reading “Privacy, Profit, and Tech Regulation”
Many of us have quickly become accustomed to our phone acting as our credit card (Google Pay, Apple Pay), but pretty soon we may be putting our official IDs onto our phones as well. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO — which you might think is a confused acronym, but comes from the fact that … Continue reading “Electronic driver’s licenses are coming”
If you don’t live in the EU, and don’t run a globally-targeted website, you may be forgiven for not being familiar with GDPR — the General Data Protection Regulation of the EU. If you do live in the EU, then you’ll be intimately familiar with the endless “agreeing” you have to do to various cookie … Continue reading “EU restricts personal data transfers to the US”
Here we are, yet again, back at Newsletter #14, wherein I brought up some of the problems with TikTok being controlled by the Chinese, and statements by the new CEO (who is an American), who asserts that they don’t send US user data to Chinese authorities, and moreover that they’d refuse if it were demanded. Things … Continue reading “TikTok and China”
Some of the craziest conspiracy theories out there involve George Soros / Bill Gates / [random rich person] doing something to force / sneak embedded RFID chips into everyone. The natural response of any moderately educated and moderately sane person is to discard this nonsense out of hand. OK. Fair enough. So why has the … Continue reading “George Soros to force RFID chips on everyone (or, when truth is stranger than fiction)”
Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference was last week. As expected, one of the biggest announcements was that they’re moving away from Intel and to their own chips. And, although it wasn’t front and center, it was mentioned enough that I’m sticking with my prediction that this is all about “AI”, and we’re going to see … Continue reading “WWDC and privacy”
Two significant bills were put forth in the US this week, both of which are sure to have global consequences if passed. Let’s start with the bad. The Senate has put forth what they’re calling the LAED bill, which is an even worse version of their previous EARN IT bill. It would effectively kill privacy … Continue reading “Internet legislation in the US”
Think privacy is bad in China? Wait until you see what India is planning. The Indian government has secretly been working on a “comprehensive” social registry, that will track every aspect of every citizen’s life: “when a citizen moves between cities, changes jobs, buys new property, when a member of a family is born, dies … Continue reading “Surveillance in India and The US”
Last week, Mozilla announced that they’re going to enable DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) by default in Firefox for US users. Chrome, Edge, and Opera also use DoH. Today, more and more websites are using HTTPS — an encrypted connection that, amongst other things, makes your browsing history invisible. However, the way the Internet works, you need to … Continue reading “It’s time to switch web browsers”
There is a long way to go in the discussion on privacy, facial recognition, etc…; and even further to go in terms of legislation; and it’s going to play out differently around the world. But there’s no reason to accelerate the surveillance state — and Ring is extra bad. Not only do they have previously-secret … Continue reading “Don’t buy Ring as a gift (or for yourself)”
China is spreading Uyghur recognition across the country At least twelve projects across China are mandating that the ability to identify Uyghur be built into their facial-recognition systems. Imagine if US police RFPs started mandating Navajo recognition? Or if the English started mandating Welsh recognition? Remember, TikTok is controlled by China Seventeen-year-old Feroza Aziz wanted … Continue reading “China, Uyghur, TikTok”
Facebook entered new territory this week by suing Israeli cyber-intelligence firm, NSO Group, in California federal court. There are lots of issues here. Most people want private communications to be private. Most people want to be able to have criminals prosecuted. But what’s a criminal act in one country may not be in another, and … Continue reading “When is it legal to hack?”