Which apps and tools actually keep your messages safe?
In the face of widespread Internet surveillance, we need a secure and practical means of talking to each other from our phones and computers. Many companies offer “secure messaging” products—but are these systems actually secure? We decided to find out, in the first phase of a new EFF Campaign for Secure & Usable Crypto.
Mobile phones are incredibly powerful communication tools, but they are inherently insecure. Learn how you can keep yourself, your personal information, and your friends and family safer.
Protect My Privacy (PMP) lets you protect the personal information on your iPhone. It provides a layer of security between apps and the operating system, thereby giving the control back to the user. When an app attempts to access any protected information, an alert is shown and you have the option to “Protect” or “Allow”. The software is unique in that rather than merely blocking access to the information, which could cause the app to have unexpected behaviour or even crash, PMP instead supplies fake replacement information, such as randomized contact names, or a location specified by you. You can quickly switch between real and fake information, even while the app is running. PMP also provides automatic protection using crowd-sourced recommendations, this uses information from previous manual decisions made by other users for the same app.
Dozens of smartphone apps collect so much location data that their publishers can plot users’ comings and goings in detail, a forthcoming peer-reviewed study found.
Today, in a period characterized by financialization and globalization, where “information” is king, the idea of any commodity defining an era might seem quaint. But commodities are no less important today, and people’s relationships to them remain central to understanding society. If the automobile was fundamental to grasping the last century, the smartphone is the defining commodity of our era.
A large number of apps demand access to your private information such as location, contacts and text messages. How would you react if real people demanded the same?
Data that shows where people live, work, and play is being sold to businesses and city planners, as mobile operators seek new sources of revenue.
Software: From retailing to counterterrorism, the ability to analyse social connections is proving increasingly usefu.
Intelligence services collect metadata on the communication of all citizens. Politicians would have us believe that this data doesn’t say all that much. A reader of De Correspondent put this to the test and demonstrated otherwise: metadata reveals a lot more about your life than you think.
An algorithm can better predict your future movements by getting a little help from your friends.
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