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Interview: Encryption expert Riana Pfefferkorn on the erosion of online free speech
This post was originally published on August 20, 2020. Riana Pfefferkorn is the associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS), a technology...
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Face masks do help evade facial recognition tech—for now
This post was originally published on August 15, 2020. Two birds, one stone: Not only do face masks help stem the transmission of the novel coronavirus, but a new study also suggests that they might m...
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The CIA was secretly granted much more freedom to carry out cyberattacks
This post was originally published on August 7, 2020. Yahoo News has reported that the CIA was granted sweeping powers by President Donald Trump in 2018 to conduct cyberattacks against adversaries of ...
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Big changes to data protection laws in the EU and Brazil
If you’re one of the 656 million people who live in the EU or Brazil, then a series of recent developments might impact the way companies like Facebook and Google handle your data. The first, a ruli...
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New semester, new surveillance: How schools plan to monitor students
This post was originally published on July 28, 2020. It is somehow almost September, which normally signals the start of another school year for many children and university students. While Covid-19 h...
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U.S. Senate to vote on EARN IT bill, endangering encryption
The EARN IT bill, which would make tech companies liable for the behavior of its users, was unanimously approved by a U.S. Senate committee on July 2 and will be presented for a vote on the Senate flo...
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Three things we learned from the EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance
Wonder what sort of surveillance your city has? There’s a map for that. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched the “largest-ever” searchable database of police use of surveillance...
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Staying private and anonymous online is in your best financial interests
We know advertisers love to track us online through avenues such as browser fingerprinting, tracking cookies, Bluetooth beacons, IP addresses, and other methods of de-anonymization. And that, in turn,...
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In a possible first, facial recognition has led to a wrongful arrest
This post was originally published on July 7, 2020. Facial recognition tech has been banned in U.S. cities like San Francisco and, most recently, Boston, on top of a concerted campaign to outlaw it on...
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The battle to outlaw end-to-end encryption in the U.S. is heating up
This post was originally published on July 2, 2020. Following the introduction of the EARN IT bill in the U.S. Senate in March—a bipartisan legislation that sought to impose government-mandated “b...
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