At a moment when American lawmakers are reconsidering the broad surveillance powers assumed by the government after Sept. 11, the lower house of the French Parliament took a long stride in the opposite direction Tuesday, overwhelmingly approving a bill that could give the authorities their most intrusive domestic spying abilities ever, with almost no judicial oversight.
Do you know that you are being watched?
You wouldn’t let that happen in real world
Would you allow a stranger to enter your home, and look around?
When you send an email, it’s like a postcard, several agents (digital and human) copy and read it on the way. Would you accept it in real life?
Why accepting this in your digital life?
How important is privacy to you?
Before we get into understanding privacy and share some of our favorite related tips and tools with you, take a moment to ask yourself how important privacy is to you. If you haven’t given it much thought before, your answer might surprise you.
La Quadrature du Net publishes “Reclaim Our Privacy”, a three-minute movie that explains the threat to, the importance of protecting, and the tools to reclaim our privacy online. The movie is released under CC BY-SA, so feel free to share or remix it!
What Crystal is offering is something like digital clairvoyance when it comes e-mail communications and marketing. Ostensibly, the automated interface makes it effortless to tweak your prose to conform with a recipient’s conception of an ideal note.
First, insurance companies gave us black boxes to put in our cars so they could track our driving, in exchange for discounts when we refrain from speeding. Now, they’re coming for our bodies.
At the end of last winter, a gigantic billboard advertising Android, Google’s operating system, appeared over Times Square in New York. In a lower-case sans serif font – corporate code for friendly – it declared: “be together. not the same.” This erratically punctuated mantra sums up the web’s most magical proposition – its existence as a space in which no one need ever suffer the pang of loneliness, in which friendship, sex and love are never more than a click away, and difference is a source of glamour, not of shame.
Our mission to help people unlock the value of their personal data.
Almost every link in the economic chain has their hand in our collective data pocket. Data brokers in the US alone account for a $15bn industry, yet they have zero relationship with the consumers whose data they harvest and sell. They offer no discernible benefit back to the producers of this great data asset – you.
We, the People of the Internet, need to remember the glory of its revelation so that we reclaim it now in the name of what it truly is.
Two years ago, comic book writer Brian Vaughan and comic book artist Marcos Martin teamed up for a 10-volume series called The Private Eye, about a future in which society has abandoned the Internet due to “the Cloud” bursting. It’s the year 2076, sixty years after everyone’s secrets spilled out into the open, and no one wants to own a smartphone or commit anything to collective digital memory. The graphic novel’s hero is a journalist who has to solve a murder (while deprived of the power of Googling) and thwart an evil TV executive. (Without Internet, television is thriving of course.)