I’ve launched a privacy newsletter that spies on the people who are spying on you: The Canary in the Data Mine. It’s about privacy, surveillance, and cybersecurity. The first installment considers, among other things, why Jeffrey Toobin was jerking off during a work meeting. Read it here. Subscribe here.
An excerpt:
“I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention The New Yorker scribe Jeffrey Toobin’s Zoom incident, in which the journalist was caught jerking his meat during a virtual work meeting. Generally, I follow the Bible on such matters—see John 8:7: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone’—but Toobin’s tubin’ merits a closer look.”
Email | About | My Book | Twitter | Instagram | Blog | Newsletter
I’m reading “Taking Back Our Privacy” by Anna Wiener in The New Yorker.
An excerpt:
“Acton and Marlinspike wanted to demonstrate that it is possible to build mainstream technology that is not beholden to the incentives of venture capital, or to markets, despite the overwhelming cost of producing and maintaining software. Signal has always been remote. Its nonprofit status protects it from outside interests demanding rapid returns. Nonprofits cannot be acquired by for-profit companies, so there will be no repeat of what happened between Whisper Systems and Twitter, or between WhatsApp and Facebook. Acton told me, ‘The user is the customer, and we can actually put them first in terms of what their needs and their desires are, rather than a corporate bottom line or a profit motive or anything else. To me, it’s a powerful message to deliver.’”
I’m a writer. Subscribe to my newsletter.
If you haven’t yet read Kashmir Hill’s frightening peek into the monetization of facial recognition, do: “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It.” What if there was nowhere in the world you could hide?
“‘It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,’ said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. ‘Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we’re all screwed.’”
Like what I do? Support my work! Buy my digital short story: THE TUMOR.
