( Thinking... )

Credited with capturing Bin Laden, predictive policing, and experts in collecting and mining data, Palantir has unorthodox corporate governance assuring the founders’ control until well, forever. And apart from the corporate control issues, this loss making ($580 million) company is knee deep in your data. Should we be concerned? For a good summary the original […]

Amnesty has published an article on a mass surveillance policing experiment in the Netherlands – The Sensing Project. Location and video data in and around a town named Roermond is used to calculate a ‘risk score’. The purpose is to test an algorithm which can effectively predict the likelihood one of ‘us’ will commit property […]

The jist of this is: start by looking at whether a VPN service is headquartered outside of the US and the reach of its intelligence-sharing partner countries, like those comprising the Five, Nine or 14 Eyes compacts. I always get the impression these articles are co-opted. About half way through you get the standard, “oh I […]

This is getting scarier each day! Companies like NumberEight, or competitors Sentiance and Neura, use sensor data to categorize users. Instead of building a profile to target, say, women over 35, a service could target ads to “early risers” (as indicated by sensors noting when the phone is picked up after hours of rest) or […]

Marcus Carter, University of Sydney and Ben Egliston, Queensland University of Technology Have written a good article on Facebook’s data grab republished, here. The original was published on The Conversation. Facebook has announced the latest version of its successful standalone virtual reality (VR) headset, the Oculus Quest 2. The new device packs more computing power and a sharper screen than its predecessor, […]

This is another good article from Medium and David Koff. He’s not using the right VPN, but that’s for another time! He walks you through a few key points: Download and use always, a VPN Use a safe browser To Tor or not to Tor – With a VPN? Safe Search Engines The original article […]

It’s a method websites use to track visitors across the web by assigning a unique identifier (the “fingerprint”) to them. It contains a ton of data that can be matched against the browser characteristics of known people. Also, browser fingerprinting allows websites to link online behavior patterns to specific users. … A decent article explaining browser fingerprinting. […]

The popular VPN services promote thousands of locations, is that really important? No… The reviews you read will say that it improves speed, but that’s mostly false. Try finding a server that’s not full of free users or users abusing bandwidth. The architectures on some of the popular vpn’s are built as cheaply as possible, […]