data privacy

$ whoami Hi there, My name is Olivier Falcoz. I am a random French-speaking dude who go by the alias of 9x0rg. You might have crossed me under the nicknames of elpanzer or panz’ in the past. I’m a Infosec & risk management professional at day, formerly based in the Asia-Pacific region and now impatriated in Provence. I’ve been one of the maintainer of two MTB-related websites during my years in Asia; KLMBH an association perpetuating the tradition of the running Hash1 but on a mountain bike and TRAKS, a trail conservancy NGO in Malaysia....

[First published on September 05, 2016] I am ditching WhatsApp, following Facebook’s decision to begin harvesting data from its messaging service. Even though Motherboard claims “it may be possible to prevent WhatsApp to give your phone number to Facebook” (LOL) WhatsApp will still harvest your metadata. “Sharing metadata with Facebook still exposes users to significant risks,” says Claire Gartland, consumer protection counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Facebook will have data indicating who WhatsApp users communicate with and how frequently, and connecting WhatsApp users with their social media accounts and broader online activity, associations, political affiliations, and more....

Knowing it and getting used to it: surveillance apathy turns out to be more worrisome than the proper lack of understanding online surveillanc. You may be sick of worrying about online privacy, but surveillance apathy is also a problem. We all seem worried about privacy. Though it’s not only privacy itself we should be concerned about: it’s also our attitudes towards privacy that are important. When we stop caring about our digital privacy, we witness surveillance apathy....

A brief history of GnuPG: vital to online security but free and underfunded Donate to GnuPG. Most people have never heard of the software that makes up the machinery of the internet. Outside developer circles, its authors receive little reward for their efforts, in terms of either money or public recognition. One example is the encryption software GNU Privacy Guard (also known as GnuPG and GPG), and its authors are regularly forced to fundraise to continue the project....

China has largely blocked the WhatsApp messaging app, the latest move by Beijing to step up surveillance ahead of a big Communist Party gathering next month. The disabling in mainland China of the Facebook-owned app is a setback for the social media giant, whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has been pushing to re-enter the Chinese market, and has been studying the Chinese language intensively. WhatsApp was the last of Facebook products to still be available in mainland China; the company’s main social media service has been blocked in China since 2009, and its Instagram image-sharing app is also unavailable....

Personal data isn’t the new oil - it is toxic waste. Companies should: Create as little as, Regularly clean it, Store it securely – Terence Eden on Twitter

Minority Report is set in 2054, but Palantir is putting pre-crime into operation now. Peter Thiel’s CIA-backed, data-mining firm honed its ‘crime predicting’ techniques against insurgents in Iraq. The same methods are now being sold to police departments. Palantir watches everything you do and predicts what you will do next in order to stop it. As of 2013, its client list included the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS....

The 21 suspected government users of RCS by Hacking Team Hacking Team, also known as HT S.r.l., is a Milan-based company that describes itself as the “first to propose an offensive solution for cyber investigations". Their flagship Remote Control System (RCS)1 product, billed “the hacking suite for governmental interception,” is a suite of remote monitoring implants (i.e., spyware) sold exclusively to government agencies worldwide. We suspect that twenty-one governments are using Hacking Team’s RCS spyware....

Daily surveillance of the general public conducted by the search engine, along with Facebook, is far more insidious than anything our spooks get up to. “Surveillance”, as the security expert Bruce Schneier has observed, is the business model of the internet and that is true of both the public and private sectors. – Guardian - June 18, 2017

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? In recent years, a wide range of companies has started to monitor, track and follow people in virtually every aspect of their lives....