Surveillance is the business model of the Internet. We build systems that spy on people in exchange for services. Corporations call it marketing.
Tag: privacy
Safe display of external images in Gmail
Official Gmail Blog lets us know that the latest update to Gmail now safely shows external images. Most other email programs and services disable image show by default, because these can either contain all kinds of malware, or they can be used for tracking. Gmail solves it now by downloading those images and serving them to users from its own servers.
But thanks to new improvements in how Gmail handles images, you’ll soon see all images displayed in your messages automatically across desktop, iOS and Android. Instead of serving images directly from their original external host servers, Gmail will now serve all images through Google’s own secure proxy servers.
So what does this mean for you? Simple: your messages are more safe and secure, your images are checked for known viruses or malware, and you’ll never have to press that pesky “display images below” link again. With this new change, your email will now be safer, faster and more beautiful than ever.
I’m not the biggest fan of HTML emails, but since I have not much choice in this area, I’d rather receive emails with images – at least I won’t be trying to make sense of empty layouts with no text anymore.
Facebook Android app update is insane …
… even for me. I’ve been saying for a while that the privacy is pretty much dead, but this new update of Facebook Android app is asking for way too may permissions even for my taste. Some of the things that it “needs” now are: access to make phone calls without user intervention, accessing information about other running applications, and drawing over other applications’ screens, so you won’t even know anymore who is responsible for what you are seeing.
When I got an update notification, I thought, at first, that that was a mistake of some sort or a really late and lame April 1st joke. Albeit it’s not. Even Slashdot runs the story.
For now, I’ll hold the old version. Maybe Facebook will rectify this new change. If not, then I’ll get rid of it and go back to Twitter and, possibly, Google+.
