Encrypted Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Private: A Look at WhatsApp Privacy Concerns
Guest Post by Karen McInnes What’s up with WhatsApp? You may have noticed increased news coverage on WhatsApp, this post will break down some of the privacy concerns being discussed. This all started in 2014, when WhatsApp was bought by Facebook. Two years later, WhatsApp began sharing user data with Facebook, unless users specifically chose […]
A Model for Your Data Double: What Your Behaviour Tells Algorithms
Have you thought about the impacts of your actions while online? Maybe you have deleted a post that you made in error, or accidentally clicked on an ad while browsing the web. Although these actions were accidental to you, they may have been perceived as intentional actions that characterize your online identity to an algorithm […]
In the News: Researchers Create ‘Master Key’ Fingerprint to Fool Biometric Security
Do you use fingerprints as part of the security of your mobile phone? If you think that the unique characteristics of your fingers provide adequate protection from unauthorized access to your personal information, read on! According to a report by TheNextWeb [1], researchers at New York University have created a set of master fingerprint keys […]
Technology companies are updating their privacy policies for their benefit, not yours
You may have noticed that a lot of companies are updating their privacy policies. It’s not a coincidence. And these major corporations haven’t suddenly begun caring about the privacy of their users; in fact, many are still profiting from exploiting the information that they collect. These companies are updating their privacy policies to protect themselves. […]
#DeleteFacebook? An Investigation into the Cambridge Analytica Scandal Part 2
As we learned in Part 1 of this series, Global Science Research (GSR), Facebook, and Cambridge Analytica have each been the subjects of recent controversy for their respective roles in mining data from over 50 million Facebook profiles. While we can investigate how each company contributed to this event, we must also examine our […]
#DeleteFacebook? An Investigation into the Cambridge Analytica Scandal Part 1
On March 17, 2018, Cambridge Analytica came under fire and amassed international attention as news broke of the company’s role in harvesting data from over 50 million Facebook profiles [1]. While the unfolding story has outraged many, it has also presented numerous questions: how did this happen? How much trust are we putting in our […]
