Tag Archives: Privacy

De-Googlifying Your Life

Posted on 2018-11-09 by jcs

I came across a post from Kev Quirk on why he was ditching his Android phone. He’s trading it in for an iPhone SE. The TL;DR is that Quirk tired of having Google pry into his life and record everything … Continue reading →

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Matt Green Gives Up Chrome

Posted on 2018-10-26 by jcs

Matt Green, whom Irreal has mentioned many times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), is a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins with an interest in user privacy. He’s also a long-time Google Chrome user. But now Green … Continue reading →

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Mike Elgan on Google

Posted on 2018-10-18 by jcs

I’ve been reading Mike Elgan since his article on the New Bedouins in 2007. He still writes about technology but is increasingly focusing on traveling to exotic places and sampling their food and wine. One of his latest posts on … Continue reading →

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Things I Don’t Miss

Posted on 2018-09-19 by jcs

I just upgraded to Safari 12.0. I’ve been looking forward to it because Apple has greatly expanded the anti-tracking measures in the new Safari. Apparently the extension framework has changed because one of my extensions was deleted and the other … Continue reading →

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Firefox’s Plans for Fighting Tracking

Posted on 2018-09-08 by jcs

The Firefox developers at Mozilla are no longer going to tolerate the miscreants in the Adtech business. On their blog, they lay out their plans for dealing with tracking. Among other things, they will be stripping cookies from tracking sites … Continue reading →

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When Advertising Is Not Advertising

Posted on 2018-08-02 by jcs

Nicholas Rempel has an excellent rant on what passes for advertising these days with the post What We Have Now Is Not Advertising. His thesis is that while things like billboards, TV ads, and magazine ads are advertising, much of … Continue reading →

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We Have Always Been at War with Spam

Posted on 2018-06-15 by jcs

Via Wilfed Hughes we have: 1864: The first record of electronic spam involved a telegram sent by a dentist in London. One of the recipients was so infuriated by this poppycock that he composed a letter to the editor of … Continue reading →

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The Irreal Privacy Policy

Posted on 2018-05-26 by jcs

As far as I can tell, the GDPR does not apply to Irreal. Nevertheless, Irreal is trivially in compliance because we don’t collect or store any information about our readers. Even if we did collect such information, we would never … Continue reading →

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Going Dark: How Many Locked Phones Are There?

Posted on 2018-05-24 by jcs

In news that will surprise exactly no Irreal readers, the Washington Post and Techdirt are reporting that the FBI has been lying about the “going dark” problem. One of their favorite refrains is that terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and whatever … Continue reading →

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California Stores the DNA of All Babies Born in the State

Posted on 2018-05-16 by jcs

What could go wrong? The iron law of data collection, that’s what. It’s been a while since I’ve written about the iron law, so here’s a quick recap: The iron law states: Whenever the government (or anyone else for that … Continue reading →

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