Category Archives: Surveillance
Publication: (Un)Lawful Access, Its Potentials, and its Lack of Necessity
Last year I was approached by the founder and editor in chief of The Winston Report to update and publish one of my postings on Canada’s forthcoming lawful access legislation. A preprint version of my contribution, which retained a creative-commons license as part of my agreement with the editor in chief, is made available to you under the normal Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial 2.5 Canada license. Continue reading
(Un)Lawful Access: Vancouver Premiere & Panel Discussion
The Conservative government is trying to push through a set of electronic surveillance laws that will invade your privacy and cost you money. The plan is to force every phone and Internet provider to allow “authorities” to collect the private information of any Canadian, at any time, without a warrant.
Find out more THIS THURSDAY at 6:30 PM. Continue reading
Transparent Practices Don’t Stop Prejudicial Surveillance
Drawing from lessons around privacy codes and those around Canadian ISPs’ surveillance practices, I argue that transparency constitutes a necessary but insufficient measure to mitigate prejudicial surveillance practices and technologies. We must go further and inject public values into development cycles while also intentionally hobbling surveillance technologies to rein in their most harmful potentialities. Continue reading
Respecting User Privacy in WordPress
In this post, I’m going to do a few things: first, I’m going to quickly recount why Automattic is not respecting user privacy by including Quantcast in its Stats plugin. Next, I’ll argue that reasonable users are unlikely to realize that third-party tracking is appended to the Stats plugin. Finally, I’ll discuss how you can protect your web visitors’ own privacy and security by installing a terrific plugin developed by Frank Goossens. Continue reading
