Tag: privacy

Publishers Haven’t Realized Just How Big a Deal GDPR is

Lately, I feel like I’m behaving very similar to Steve Ballmer, running around screaming “GDPR! GDPR! GDPR!”.

But I find it to be a huge change for anyone around Europe, and I see it coming into play very soon, and most of the people around me are mostly like “GDPR? What’s that?”.

This article does a lot of good explaining how big of a deal it is.  And it doesn’t matter whether you support this or totally against it, I think it will be a huge change for everyone all around.  In particularly so – technical people implementing the necessary changes.

Crooked Style Sheets

Crooked Style Sheets is a proof of concept for website tracking/analytics using only CSS and without Javascript.

What can we do with this method?

We can gather some basic information about the user, like the screen resolution (when the browser is maximized) and which browser (or engine) is used. Further we can detect if a user opens a link or hovers with the mouse over an element. This can be used to track which (external) links a user visits and using the hover method. It should be even possible to track how the user moved their mouse (using an invisible table of fields in the page background). However, using my method it’s only possible to track when a user visits a link the first time or hovers over a field the first time. Maybe it’s possible to modify the method so that it is possible to track every click.

Furthermore it is possible to detect if a user has installed a specific font. Based on this information it should be possible to detect, which OS a users uses (because different operating systems ship different fonts, e.g. “Calibri” on Windows).

Let’s Encrypt is leading Top SSL Issuers

Netrack reports some statistics for the Top SSL Issuers, and it’s nice to see Let’s Encrypt leading the race with a significant advantage over the rest. Well done, ladies and gentlemen!

The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images

“The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images” is a rather extensive look at the history of privacy.

Privacy, as we understand it, is only about 150 years old.  Humans do have an instinctual desire for privacy. However, for 3,000 years, cultures have nearly always prioritized convenience and wealth over privacy.

I said “there is no such thing as privacy, and there never was” way too many times.  But I never had to go deep into the subject to defend it.  This article, on the other hand, does a much better job defending the argument than I ever cared to.

I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets

“I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets” is a must read for any of you who believe in online privacy.  Here’s a quote to get you started:

At 9.24pm (and one second) on the night of Wednesday 18 December 2013, from the second arrondissement of Paris, I wrote “Hello!” to my first ever Tinder match. Since that day I’ve fired up the app 920 times and matched with 870 different people. I recall a few of them very well: the ones who either became lovers, friends or terrible first dates. I’ve forgotten all the others. But Tinder has not.

The dating app has 800 pages of information on me, and probably on you too if you are also one of its 50 million users. In March I asked Tinder to grant me access to my personal data. Every European citizen is allowed to do so under EU data protection law, yet very few actually do, according to Legit Hookup Sites and their associations.

With the help of privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye from personaldata.io and human rights lawyer Ravi Naik, I emailed Tinder requesting my personal data and got back way more than I bargained for.

Some 800 pages came back containing information such as my Facebook “likes”, my photos from Instagram (even after I deleted the associated account), my education, the age-rank of men I was interested in, how many times I connected, when and where every online conversation with every single one of my matches happened … the list goes on.