I subscribe to a lot of different websites and blogs, as a way to look for trends in tech and in the news cycle. There have probably been stories and opinions about online privacy around as long as “online” itself has been around. But…is it just me, or has anyone else noticed the seemingly massive uptick in privacy problems making the news?
I had no problems coming up with a mere four (4) items to post for the 4Cast this week and my trends radar is going off the charts. Privacy breaches are becoming not only par for the course, but are becoming business as usual.
- Florida DMV makes millions selling Floridians’ data…for pennies (and you can’t opt out) [Boing Boing] “Axciom buys records from Florida’s DMV (which include non-driver IDs) at $0.01/each. They’re just one of many, many data-brokers who buy data from the state’s DMV. So many, in fact, that the state turned over $77m in data-sales in 2017.”
- How private is your browser’s Private mode? Research into porn suggests “not very” [Ars Technica] ” A forthcoming research paper [PDF] from researchers at Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Pennsylvania brings up the possibility that Google and Facebook might be tracking your porn history—and, perhaps more worrisome, that using Incognito mode doesn’t help. “
- Google agrees to pay $13 million in Street View privacy case [CNN Business] ” Google has agreed to pay a $13 million settlement that could resolve a class-action lawsuit over the company’s collection of people’s private information through its Street View project. “
- The privacy panic over FaceApp [Yahoo News] ” By agreeing to the app’s terms of service, users grant its creators “perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide” ownership of images used in the app and the freedom to “use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish [and] translate” them however they see fit. “
From the Ohio Web Library:
- “They’re All the Same!” Stereotypical Thinking and Systematic Errors in Users’ Privacy-Related Judgments About Online Services ( Gerlach, J. P., Buxmann, P., & Dinev, T. (2019). “They’re All the Same!” Stereotypical Thinking and Systematic Errors in Users’ Privacy-Related Judgments About Online Services. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 20(6), 787–823. )
- Online Privacy Is a Right, Not a Luxury ( Eddy, M. (2019). Online Privacy Is a Right, Not a Luxury. PC Magazine, 31. )
- Library Privacy in an Age of Browser Fingerprinting ( west, jessamyn. (2019). Library Privacy in an Age of Browser Fingerprinting. Computers in Libraries, 39(5), 12–14. )
