Tag Archives: Privacy

Tracking Pixels

Posted on 2021-02-25 by jcs

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, taking a break from criticizing the president who is not the president (it’s a Zen thing), has an excellent rant on the abomination that is email tracking pixels. As most Irreal readers surely know, tracking pixels … Continue reading →

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Burner Emails

Posted on 2021-02-10 by jcs

FourZeroThree has a nice four and a half minute video on how and why you should have a burner email account. The idea has been around for a long time under the name of disposable email addresses. The idea is … Continue reading →

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This Is Tech Journalism II

Posted on 2020-12-24 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago I made fun of tech journalism. It was an easy—some might even say a cheap—shot but Gizmodo brings this kind of ridicule on themselves. Sadly, besides the buffoonery, there’s actual malpractice going on. Cellebrite is … Continue reading →

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The DEA Supplies Another Example

Posted on 2020-12-02 by jcs

Speaking of governments supplying examples of the Iron Law of Data Collection, one of the US Government’s most notorious abusers of data collection and constitutional protections whose TLA is not NSA, has stepped up to provide yet another example. The … Continue reading →

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The Iron Law and Abuse

Posted on 2020-12-01 by jcs

I’ve written many times about the iron law of data collection. Briefly, it’s the notion that whenever data is collected No matter the original rationale given for its collection, new uses will be found for the data. The data will … Continue reading →

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Cover Your Tracks

Posted on 2020-11-26 by jcs

The EFF has a new version of their Panopticlick browser fingerprinting and tracker awareness tool. It’s now called Cover Your Tracks. The tool doesn’t prevent the malevolent adtech industry from tracking you, it’s merely a testing tool to estimate how … Continue reading →

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Adtech and Bad Data

Posted on 2020-11-10 by jcs

If you aren’t in Marketing, it’s really easy to hate Adtech. It turns out that even if you are in Marketing, you should still hate it. The fact is, the numbers that Adtech produces are pretty much worthless. Although that’s … Continue reading →

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The Trial

Posted on 2020-11-02 by jcs

It’s like something out of Kafka. C. awoke one morning to find that after 15 years, all of his Google accounts were locked. He’d been accused of violating the terms of service. What violation? They wouldn’t tell him. He didn’t … Continue reading →

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The NSA Stonewalls Congress

Posted on 2020-10-29 by jcs

I don’t get this. Reuters is reporting that the NSA is refusing to tell congress about its seeking of back doors. It’s certainly true that an argument can be made that the NSA should be seeking back doors but how … Continue reading →

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The Danger of Web Forums

Posted on 2020-10-25 by jcs

Karl Voit has an interesting diatribe on his Web site that really resonated with me. The TL;DR is that you shouldn’t commit anything relevant to Web forums like Reddit, Hacker News, or Facebook. What Voit terms as “relevant,” I would … Continue reading →

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