Tag: privacy (page 1 of 19)

Teaching kids about anonymity

This website, riskyby.design, is a project of the 5Rights Foundation. It does a good job of talking about the benefits and drawbacks of anonymity in a way that isn’t patronising.

Chat app with anonymous user

Online anonymity can take many forms, from pseudonyms that conceal “real” identities to private browsers or VPNs that allow users to be “untraceable.” There are also services designed specifically to grant users anonymity, known as “anonymous apps”.

Often conflated with privacy, true anonymity – the total absence of personally identifying information – is difficult to achieve in a digital environment where traces of ourselves are left every time we engage with a service. Anonymity is best considered on a continuum, ranging “from the totally anonymous to the thoroughly named”.

People have lots of reasons for being anonymous online. While anonymity affords a degree of protection to people like journalists, whistle-blowers and marginalised users, the lack of traceability that some types of anonymity offer may prevent people from being held accountable for their actions.

Source: Risky-By-Design | 5Rights Foundation

Sharing can be hard (online)

Granular permissions between private and public spaces is a hard problem to solve, as this blog post shows.

A few years ago, Apple acquired Color Labs, who were trying to solve the ‘share with contacts based on an ‘elastic social graph’. These days, I imagine this kind of problem being solved by Bonfire.

I wanted to share the pics and videos with the people I know, so they too can see (if they like) the awesome event that I just went to.

But I had a problem that was recurring for a while, that is how to share different photos with the different connections that I have. There are photos that I can share publicly, and there are photos that I don’t want some people to see, such as my students, acquaintances, and work-related colleagues,

Source: The rings of share – the unsolved problem of sharing | Rukshan’s Blog

Meta may really be exiting Europe as soon as this year

Well, we can but hope. The backlash from Instagram-obsessed people would be too much for politicians to bear, however…

Meta has—as it must—warned its investors that it’s in deep trouble in Europe. It’s neither a threat nor a bluff, but rather a statement of fact: without a successor to the U.S.-EU Privacy Shield deal, which the EU’s top court nuked a couple of years back, Facebook and Instagram will be forced to pack up and abandon the European market.

Indeed, this uncomfortable reality was made clearer last month, when Ireland’s privacy regulator submitted a draft decision to its EU peers that would ban Facebook and Insta from transferring Europeans’ personal data to the U.S., because there is no longer any legal basis for these transfers to continue.

[…]

I find it astonishing that even Facebook’s critics, let alone the markets, haven’t glommed onto the reality of the situation. I suspect the culprit is a deep-seated notion that Mark Zuckerberg’s all-powerful company can somehow fix this by modifying its legendarily bad privacy behavior—as though it had some brilliant solution hidden up its sleeve, just waiting until the last possible second before pulling it out.

Source: Even Meta’s critics don’t grasp how likely it is that Facebook and Instagram will soon have to exit Europe | Fortune

Image: created using Midjourney