Phys.org are currently running a story titled “Internet giants wage war on pop-up ad blockers” in which they raise moral panic about the woes of the advertising industry being crippled by Ad-Blockers. Depending on the website, the percentage of viewers equipped with ad-blocking software ranges from 10 to 60 percent they claim with further citations […]

This week saw the launch of Skype Co-Founder Janus Friis’ new social communications application, WIRE.  There has been a great deal of noise about it in the press which is to be expected given Friis’ pedigree.  One of the points being made is that WIRE is based in Switzerland and complies with EU privacy laws, […]

The European Article 29 working party of national data protection regulators has issued guidelines on the European Court’s so-called right to be forgotten ruling, effectively closing some of the loopholes. Perhaps the most important of the opinions is that the ruling applies to all domains available in the EU and not just European domains. Thus, […]

The UK government is continuing to demonize internet companies, almost suggesting that they are the cause of successful terrorist attacks. In a report by the Intelligence Committee into the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby it suggests that Facebook should have detected and reported the single known incidence of one of the murderers showing his hand […]

As many people will know I was in Brussels earlier this week delivering two presentations at the IAPP Europe Data Protection Congress.  I was there to talk about encrypted email in the first session and mobile privacy (more specifically the risks BYOD pose to corporate networks, data and infrastructure) in the second session. On Wednesday […]

RedHack, a Turkish left-leaning hacker collective, has posted a video on Vimeo demonstrating what it claims to be the deletion of Türkiye Elektrik İletim A.Ş. (electricity supply) customer accounts to the tune of TRY 1.5 trillion (or more than £400 billion!). This is not an example of Robin Hood. No money has been stolen from […]

Over the last week I decided to start a new project mostly as a proof of concept but also down to curiosity as to how easy/difficult it would be – I decided to try to make myself a secure phone. Hardware-wise it was fairly simple, I have an old HTC Desire handset which has been […]

How many of you use mobile data? Have you read the terms and conditions of your mobile contract? If you have you will be aware that pretty much every mobile carrier in the world grants themselves permission to read your emails, monitor which web sites you visit and a whole host of other privacy invading […]

Professor Alan Westin was a privacy giant with research dating back to the 1960s and a professional career seen by many privacy professionals as paramount to the development of the current legal regime regarding privacy and data processing. It is without question that Westin dedicated his life to privacy law but his research was often private […]

There is a great deal of press coverage this week about Google’s announcement at CCS 2014 that they are working on a new project called RAPPOR (PDF) which reportedly uses techniques from the 1960s based around differential privacy. This is good news, or would be if it meant Google were becoming more ethical with regards […]