PUBLIC MARKS from sbrothier with tag privacy

A daily collection of #Privacy tweets from around the Twitterverse

ZXX, as the typeface is called, comes in four flavors, each exploiting a different weakness in existing OCR tech. The “Camo” style obscures letterforms with camofalgue-style blobs. “Noise” splatters them with digital graffiti. “X’ed” just lays a big, crisp X over each letter, and “False” adorns each letter with another tiny, secondary letters. With each–or better yet, a mix of them all–Mun shows how it’s still possible to print a message that can’t be snooped on by some camera peeking over a shoulder.

The name ZXX comes from the Library of Congress' Alpha-3 ISO 639-2 -- codes for the representation of names of languages. ZXX is used to declare No linguistic content; Not applicable. Free Open Type Font to open up governments.

If you want to protect yourself against government spying, or you're afraid you might be the target of a drone, there's hope beyond the good-old tinfoil hat. Two artists are now selling their high-tech privacy-protecting gear to fool drones and spies — and you can buy some of it for under $100.

The advertising industry suffered a setback late last night when the Tracking Protection Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium rejected the Digital Advertising Alliance's draft proposal for a universal Do Not Track standard.

Twitter Shows The Way Forward With Do Not Track Twitter today announced a new way of targeting advertisements for its users, including a partnership with three online tracking firms: media6degrees (m6d), Chango, and Adara. This new system will display ads based on your behavior and reading habits, which show up as "Promoted Tweets" or "Promoted Accounts." This is typical of the direction that major online companies are moving. But Twitter has made some praiseworthy design decisions:

In matters of Do Not Track, Twitter is doing things very, very right. The company unveiled yesterday its new ad retargeting effort, which lets it display advertisements to users based on their browsing activity. Basically, if you search for something like jeans online, you’re going to start a lot more advertisements for jeans in your Twitter feed. As Twitter argues, it’s all about seeing better, more relevant ads (and making more money from advertisers).

Data companies are scooping up enormous amounts of information about almost every American. They sell information about whether you're pregnant or divorced or trying to lose weight, about how rich you are and what kinds of cars you have.

Smart diapers are embedded with interactive labels that detect moisture, bacteria and sugar. But critics worry the invention could lead to false alarms.

Marketers and advertisers, too, would relish the opportunity to target our future selves with ads like, “Need a haircut? In four days, you’ll be 100 yards from a salon that will have a $15 special.” On the social side, there could even be something like a Foursquare of the Future--who wouldn’t want to know where their friends (and enemies) will be for the rest of their lives…or at least for the next 285 days?

Vortex is a game that empowers you to change how you are identified by networks. The ‘Internet’ does not exist. Originally conceived as a shared collective experience of ‘inter-networks’, today it is a mass of overlapping filter bubbles. These bubbles curate us into data-objects to be consumed and purchased by advertisers.  Browsing is determined by your consumer profile. Media-mining companies exploit invasive technologies such as IP tracking, geo-locating and cookies to create specific advertisements targeted to individuals. What you see, hear and the feeds you receive are gathered from your friends list, emails, online purchases, etc. Content presented to you is neither freely chosen nor objectively shown.

A new privacy initiative by Mozilla and Stanford amounts to a “Kangaroo Cookie Court,” that will replace “the principle of consumer choice with an arrogant 'Mozilla knows best' system.”

Devant la masse d’articles publiés sur le pseudo scandale PRISM que tout le monde aimerait savoir restreint à la politique américaine en matière de surveillance, il devient de plus en compliqué d’y voir clair. De nombreux médias, assez involontairement, ajoutent du « bruit » là où tout le monde attend un peu de lumière. Aussi modeste soit notre petit média, ce n’est pas l’envie de les secouer un bon coup qui nous manque.

Et si Andy Warhol avait tort, et qu'au lieu d'un quart d'heure de célébrité nous n'avions qu'un quart d'heure d'anonymat ? Dans cette courte intervention, Juan Enriquez parle des effets étonnamment permanents de la divulgation numérique de notre vie privée. Il nous donne les clés des Grecs anciens pour nous aider à gérer nos nouveaux "tatouages électroniques". Juan Enriquez thinks and writes about profound changes that genomics will bring in business, technology, and society. Full bio »

"This documentary should be mandatory viewing for everyone who uses the internet." John Ford, Slug Magazine

Terms And Conditions May Apply, est le titre d’un documentaire qui semble tout aussi intéressant que salutaire, a fortiori après l’affaire PRISM. Lorsque l’on crée gratuitement un compte sur Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon (dont la typographie compose le titre de l’image ci-dessous), on accepte également de souscrire à un contrat d’utilisation qui, s’il était lu et compris jusqu’au bout, devrait normalement nous faire rebrousser chemin. Mais comme « personne ne lit ces contrats » et que « tout le monde se trouve sur ces réseaux sociaux », alors on participe nous aussi à nourrir ces monstres qui sucent en toute légalité nos données. En attendant sa sortie le mois prochain, nous en avons traduit l’accueil sur le site officiel. Et peut-être même, qui sait, que nous participerons à son sous-titrage.

Admit it: you don’t really read the endless terms and conditions connected to every website you visit, phone call you make or app you download. But every day, billion-dollar corporations are learning more about your interests, your friends and family, your finances, and your secrets, and they’re not only selling the information to the highest bidder, but also sharing it with the government. And you agreed to all of it. This disquieting exposé demonstrates how every one of us is incrementally opting-in to a real-time surveillance state, click by click- and what, if anything, you can do about it.

WASHINGTON — When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency.

Fan de nouvelles technologies et de jeux vidéo en réseau, Marcus, 17 ans, mène une vie sans histoires… même s’il défie parfois les caméras de surveillance du lycée ou pirate quelques sites Internet. Jusqu’au jour où il est pris dans les mailles d’un service anti-terroriste, emprisonné et torturé. Marcus décide alors de combattre les abus du pouvoir en utilisant ses talents informatiques. Un acte de résistance, qui se transformera en un vaste mouvement de rébellion…

There was considerable mouth-dropping from publications such as The New York Times at initial reports this week that NSA programs are gathering both telephone records and information gleaned from large tech companies like Google and Microsoft. But as those reports have settled in, reactions have gotten more complex.

Twitter fait ami-ami avec l'agence de publicité britannique WPP. Les deux sociétés ont conclu un partenariat stratégique à travers lequel le puissant groupe publicitaire et de communication britannique (70 milliards de dollars de revenus !) utilisera les données du réseau social afin de mieux cibler les campagnes de ses clients.

Paris, 28 mai 2013 — Quand vous naviguez sur Internet, pouvez-vous dire qui collecte des informations à votre sujet, quelle est la nature de ces informations et qui peut y avoir accès ? Pouvez-vous contrôler qui peut savoir quoi de vous ? La Commission européenne a proposé de vous en donner le pouvoir, mais le Parlement européen, sous la pression des lobbies de l'industrie, risque de voter autrement.

Paris, 7 mai 2013 — Depuis plus d'un an, le Parlement européen étudie la proposition de règlement de la Commission européenne qui vise à réformer la législation encadrant la protection des données personnelles au niveau européen. Jusqu'à présent, les différentes commissions parlementaires ayant travaillé sur ce projet se sont exprimées pour l'assouplissement des règles protégeant notre vie privée. Alors qu'un vote crucial approche1 au sein de la commission « libertés civiles » (LIBE), La Quadrature du Net commence la publication d'une série d'analyses abordant les points clefs, enjeux, progrès et dangers de cette réforme.

This campaign site has been put together by privacy groups from across Europe including EDRi, Bits of Freedom, Open Rights Group, Privacy International, Digitale Gesellschaft, The Julia Group, Panoptykon Foundation, La Quadrature du Net and Access.