Privacy/Documentation/Articles/en

2021

3 November : Does copyright give companies the right to search your home and computer?

Walled Culture

That is, thanks to copyright, a company is perfectly able to demand the right to access a user’s premises, the computer systems they use, and to run search tools on that system as part of an audit. Although this applies to business premises, there’s no reason a software licence could not demand the same right to access somebody’s home.

2019

10 June : Big Mood Machine

The Baffler

It’s connected to what Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, calls the “behavioral futures market”—where “many companies are eager to lay their bets on our future behavior.” Indeed, Spotify seeks not just to monitor and mine our mood, but also to manipulate future behavior. “What we’d ultimately like to do is be able to predict people’s behavior through music”

2018

18 March : ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower

The Guardian

For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election. Now, 28-year-old Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate

2017

30 November : Facebook: Core EU Business Potentially at Risk when GDPR Comes into Force in May 2018; Legitimate Interest Exemption Likely Not An Escape Hatch; Privacy Activists Preparing to Sue for Violations

The Capitol Forum

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which we have covered previously, may significantly threaten Facebook’s EU advertising revenue and its core business of providing highly targeted ads. Aral Balkan, a cyborg rights activist and co-founder of the not for profit Ind.ie, told The Capitol Forum that the GDPR is “basically Europe saying to [Facebook] that their business model is unacceptable,” and analogized the increased data protection enforcement with the beginning of the downfall of big tobacco.

11 September : Facebook fined €1.2 million in Spain

Politico

Facebook was fined €1.2 million Monday by Spain’s data protection watchdog for breaking the country’s privacy rules, the latest in a series of legal problems that have beset the social networking giant in recent years.

June : Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life

Cracked Labs

Report: How thousands of companies monitor, analyze, and influence the lives of billions. Who are the main players in today’s digital tracking? What can they infer from our purchases, phone calls, web searches, and Facebook likes? How do online platforms, tech companies, and data brokers collect, trade, and make use of personal data?

2015

25 November : The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images

Medium/The Ferenstein Wire

Privacy, as we understand it, is only about 150 years old. Humans do have an instinctual desire for privacy. However, for 3,000 years, cultures have nearly always prioritized convenience and wealth over privacy. Section II will show how cutting edge health technology will force people to choose between an early, costly death and a world without any semblance of privacy. Given historical trends, the most likely outcome is that we will forgo privacy and return to our traditional, transparent existence.