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.
One of the many unfortunate fallouts from the recent hacking scandals is the harsh realization that privacy in the age of the Internet is now essentially gone. Some may argue it was never there in the first place but regardless, it’s clear today that things you do online—whether in email, instant messaging, social media or web browsing—are but a few clicks away from being exposed for all the world to see.
Scary thought, isn’t it?
It was only a matter of time before drones started monitoring signals from mobile devices.
Since early February, several small drones flying around the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles have been determining mobile devices’ locations from Wi-Fi and cellular transmission signals.
The searches we make, the news we read, the dates we go on, the advertisements we see, the products we buy and the music we listen to. The stock market. The surveillance society. The police state, and the drones. All guided by a force we never see and few understand.