Guest Post: Targeted Advertising and Ad Blocking Technologies
Targeted Advertising and Ad Blocking Technologies by Laura Moberg Have you ever wondered if your phone was listening to you? In an episode from their podcast Reply All, Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt investigate the belief many people have that Facebook is listening to us through our devices and using that information to create targeted […]
Guest Post: Algorithms and the Death of Democratic Discourse
Algorithms & The Death of Democratic Discourse by Christian Koch Our entire digital history tracked— and is still being tracked. Platforms like Google, Facebook, and others collect data from links clicked, time spent on a particular page, whether or not the content is shared, and even the most seemingly inconsequential choices— all to build pictures […]
Guest Post: Personalized Personal Lives: Students vs. Filter Bubbles
Personalized Personal Lives: Students vs. Filter Bubbles by Joe Wright We’ve all likely seen and been told about how Google’s now seamless integration into our lives sometimes results in a blurring of our lines of privacy, but another hidden tactic of Google (and many other platforms) is ‘personalizing’ the information we’re shown to appeal to […]
In the News: Saudi Arabia’s Controversial Absher App
In a story first broken by Insider, news of a malevolent function on a Saudi Arabian government app has been criticized over the past few weeks, culminating in members of the US senate pleading with Google and Apple to investigate [1]. The app, Absher has been available for download on iOS since 2015 and on […]
In the News: Reverse Location Search Warrant Leads Investigators to Google Location Users
Law enforcement agencies in Minnesota have been using reverse location search warrants to find the identities of smartphone owners that were at a crime scene. They accomplish this by issuing a warrant for Google to send the identity, billing and contact information, and web browsing history of all smartphones that reported that their Google Location […]
In the News: Google’s Knowledge Graph can be used to misinform
Have you used Google to answer a question, to find that the answer appears in a big box on the right hand side of the search results? This is Google’s Knowledge Graph technology, which stores the ‘answers’ to common questions within a structured database that organizes information on websites in a standardized way [1]. It […]
Digital Identity Digest (October 2018)
Could facial recognition be a tool for dangerous mass surveillance? An Amazon employee published an anonymous op-ed on Medium speaking out against the company’s decision to sell its facial recognition product, Rekognition, to police in the U.S. They believe it’s a system for dangerous mass surveillance, which reinforces existing bias as demonstrated in a test […]
In the News: Google Automatically Logs Users Into Chrome Browser on Google Sites
Google launched version 69.0 of its Chrome web browser on September 5, 2018 [1]. After the last version update of the browser [2], we talked Google’s decision to mark all HTTP-only websites as ‘Not Secure’. In their update for Chrome 69, Google decided to log users who had turned the ‘Sync’ feature into their […]
In the News: Google Tracks Smartphones that Disabled Location Services
You probably already know that there are tradeoffs involved with certain services offered through the internet. One such tradeoff is providing a service with your geographic location to find out where you are, or how to get to a destination from your current location. Google also receives your current geographic location via GPS data sent […]
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