NSA spying revelations shocked Google, so it encrypted the beejezus out of everything. We’ll all be dead by the time it’s cracked, Schmidt said.
Tag Archives: surveillance
How have attitudes to privacy changed post-Snowden?
A recent survey reports 43% of users avoid certain websites and applications and 39% change their passwords regularly since the Snowden revelations. Is that number low, or is it an encouraging sign of growing sensitivity to privacy issues?
US Congress OKs ‘unprecedented’ codification of warrantless surveillance
The US Congress has quietly passed a bill that includes warrantless forfeiture of private communications to local law enforcement and allows for indefinite retention of any encrypted content. 
Senate kills bill that would have reined in NSA and rampant surveillance
Yesterday the Senate axed The USA Freedom Act, which missed the chance to be debated by just two “yes” votes. With it goes what privacy advocates had called the best opportunity yet to curb the country’s run-amok surveillance.
Would you allow access to Facebook at Work? [POLL]
What would you say to a variant of Facebook that you could use at work? And not just *at* work, but *for* work?
YouTube channel swamps police with requests for disclosure of body-cam video
A YouTube channel has been surfacing police body-cam footage. It now has some 75 videos up, showing, among other things, men with knives, break-ins, car accidents, drug smoking, and an emergency phone call about a woman going into labor. Subjects’ privacy, it seems, is getting trampled in the stampede to get at such video. 
Placemeter monitors streets from apartment windows: time to don a mask?
Placemeter wants window-owners to survey real-time traffic, while promising that all that data is aggregated and anonymized and won’t be stored or shared. Should we relax?
Adobe will update e-reader to mop up clear-text data spillage
Adobe is working on an update to fix the latest iteration of its e-book reader, which has a gluttonous appetite for readers’ data and the slovenly habit of reporting our reading habits back to Adobe – in plain text. 
Twitter sues US federal agencies in attempt to remove the gag around surveillance
Twitter doesn’t want its transparency report to be fuzzy to the point of meaninglessness, full of “broad, inexact ranges” about how many times the US government has shaken it down in its surveillance operations, it says – or example, by counting them to the nearest thousand.
Dubai police add facial recognition to Google Glass
A spokesman confirmed a report that Dubai police have developed software that will connect a Glass wearer to a database of wanted people. Is it 1984 yet? 