mbla

Demystifying data ethics, privacy, and technology

Latest

The Cookie Widget now notifies users of your changes

If you update or add Micropolicies, your website visitors will be seamlessly notified 🎊 What’s different here? As you can see from the above, any new Micropolicies will show a green ‘new’ and any existing Micropolicies that you’ve made changes to will show ‘updated’ in orange. How it works: Once...

I can identify you with a dot on a piece of paper

Is there truly such a thing as anonymised data? Disclaimer: this post is about GDPR. If you’re looking for the latest in paper-based fingerprinting techniques to accelerate your retro print marketing startup, you’re in the wrong place. You probably already know what GDPR is (unless you’ve been living under a...

Using Trust Token API

To detect fraudulent or malicious actors, websites use techniques such as third-party trackers to identify an individual’s browser activity across the web for the purpose of building trust signals. While fraud prevention is an important aspect of creating secure web experiences, this method constitutes a serious privacy invasion. For this...

What are SDKs doing behind the scenes?

Yes, SDKs are useful, but think twice about what you’re using to build your apps Here are some facts for your brain (taken from a study by Kaspersky Labs): 4 million Android apps are sending unencrypted user data to advertisers, over HTTP 90% of apps are still using HTTP instead...

How to build a ‘Privacy-First’ Startup

The ten obstacles you could be faced with, and how to overcome them. In today’s privacy-first world, the stakes have never been higher for handling user data. Increasing GDPR fines, new regulations like the CCPA, and elevating consumer expectations — missing basic privacy controls could kill your business. But with a product to...

Privacy centre: an alternative solution

We are piloting an alternative to normal privacy policies. Currently, in the footer of a website, where you would expect to find a link to our privacy policy, you instead see a button to a Privacy Centre, and then you will see this: The Privacy Centre, where you find our...

Writing good Micropolicies for your users

If you’re striving to build trust with transparency, you most definitely need to be understood first It will be hard for users to trust you if they don’t understand what your Micropolicies are even saying đŸ€«. A Micropolicy tells your users: What data you are collecting Why you are collecting...

Why we made TrackerTracker

TrackerTracker is a tool anyone can use to see how many cookies a website will set when you visit it. So essentially it tracks trackers — get it? That’s the name out of the way. More importantly: why did we decide to build this, and why did it take us...

ePrivacy Regulation: the new cookie rules

Don’t be scared of this regulation, it could actually end your cookie headaches. The new cookie consent rules that the ePrivacy Regulation will give the internet will plug some holes that the GDPR does not account for. Here are the broad strokes of these new cookie rules: 👐 The responsibility...

What is a Micropolicy?

Essentially, a Micropolicy is an “atomic unit” of a privacy policy It’s an agreement between you and your users as to how your organisation uses their data. Based on what permissions your users give you, you can easily control the flow of their data through your products or services. The...

Cookie Widget design update: not just a facelift

A quick look at what is new, in one gif
 Essentially, less clicks to manage consent = closer to the GDPR standard. The first thing you may notice is that we added a ‘no’ button at the top level: Yes, we added a ‘no’ button. This decision was important, and...

Why cookie banners won't exist in two years

Aren’t you sick of seeing these every time you visit a new website? Quite right, you should be sick of them — sick of interacting with them, ignoring them, or even implementing them yourself because the onus is on you to do so as a website owner. New regulations such...

Why cookie categories are important

It’s not enough to tell your users that you want to set cookies — you also need to tell them why Your site needs cookies to work as you intend it to. But do your users know that? Under current regulation standards (e.g. the GDPR) and upcoming ones like the...

Contextual Consent

A non-intrusive way for your users to give consent, as and when they need to Contextual Consent will allow your users to consent to cookies as and when they need to — not all at once upon visiting your site. This adheres much more closely to GDPR standards because your...

A decade of data privacy

Wow, that decade flew by faster than a self-driving car
 
which is only about 10mph at the moment. If you somehow can remember as far back as 2010, you’ll know that no one was barking at Alexa to turn on the radio, or worried that their doorbell might be wrongfully...

Behavioural advertising: what's happening behind the scenes?

The world of online advertising is confusing and abstract, so let’s just clear some things up
 It is a model whereby our behaviour, attention, and experiences are made available for profit. For the everyday user of the internet, this is extremely intrusive and annoying. A birds-eye view of the online...

Why do so many websites use tracking tools?

Put down your coffee and look at this scan result from TrackerTracker: This result is just from the homepage of Enfield Council’s website — subpages may contain additional cookies These are scan results from the Enfield Council’s website — they set quite a lot of cookies without asking first, and...

Privacy is not a feature, it's a necessity

Here’s how Big Tech’s main players are getting their privacy messaging wrong
 When the GDPR bomb finally dropped in 2018, there was a desperate scramble among Big Tech companies — whose business models revolve around the exploitation of user data — to make some changes. But are these changes only...

Tools to help us value data in 2020

There’s a new trend of apps and services who have made privacy their business. Some will even pay users for their data. This is important because in the current infrastructure of the internet, we are not equipped to adequately value the data we produce by using online platforms. Sure, the...

New feature: Autoblock (beta)

We’ve automated the blocking of third-party scripts for you with Autoblock 🛠 Autoblock is in early beta stages at the moment, but we’re excited for everyone to try. If you have feedback, visit a homepage and chat to us on Intercom :) With Autoblock, Company will find all third-party scripts...

The fight for our health data

Health data is arguably the most valuable data we have — which is why companies want it We all know that there’s a lot of money in health, because humans have frail, sensitive bodies which are prone to disease and ageing — all of us need to access healthcare at...

Valuing data: you will never value it as much as Big Tech

The current rhetoric is that data privacy is something you should care about — but in order to truly keep data private, you actually have to value it. Earlier this year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had his Twitter account hacked into via SIM swapping. How did this happen? Because SIM...

How AWS nearly shut us down over our link-shortener

We made a privacy-first link shortener that ended up being more trouble than it was worth. In the very early days of Company, we got this reply to one of our tweets. Several things are wrong here: We failed to realise that Buffer (a social media management platform) automatically shortens...

I want my business to be ethical: now what?

Disinformation, privacy violations, information overload, cyber bullying, financial malpractice
 when it comes to modern technologies and the modern technology industry, professionals have a lot to answer for. It is a truism to state that technology has changed the world around us, and the impacts are not as utopian as the...

🛰 Satellite internet is coming, brought to you by SpaceX

Now that all the Cybertruck excitement has died down, let’s take a look at what Elon Musk’s new broadband service could mean. At the time of writing, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has given the thumbs-up for SpaceX to fling 12,000 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit. They’re doing this in...

What is the ePrivacy Regulation?

It has exactly what the GDPR is missing: rules that will actually put a stop to cookie banners. Here are some key things to know about the ePrivacy Regulation: It’s still in draft mode and the regulation is not yet in effect Its rules concerning cookie consent are a lot...

Valuing data: the price of opting out

Is the cost of refusal greater than the cost of participation? Here’s something we must understand about free platforms such as Facebook: it is an ad network, designed to take in as much information about humans as possible, so it can thrive on a bed of behavioural data — in...

Data privacy has changed the way we look at trust

The phrase “we value your privacy” smeared across the top of a cookie banner no longer has any meaning Here’s Buzzfeed’s cookie banner after you click through to get to your preferences — they say that they value my privacy, yet have provided a list of data-gathering companies with obscure...

New York Times removes Facebook pixel

They’d rather make money from subscriptions, instead of paying for tracking technology A bold move from the New York Times: they are going to stop using tracking pixels from Facebook and Twitter, and use their own marketing tool instead. ☝ How this new marketing tool works: instead of tracking users...

The 3 stages of the user data journey

At Company, we spend 95% of our time thinking about the flow of user data
 
and 5% of the time discussing where to go for lunch. The internet comprises of a complex network of entities, many of them collecting, handling, and processing user data. The data is going on a...

New onboarding flow for our Cookie Widget

We’ve made changes to how you set up your Company Cookie Widget We’ve made it even quicker and easier to get our Cookie Widget on your site — here’s what we did and why we did it. Firstly, when you sign up you can tell us more about the organisation...

All data is health data

If all your behaviour is recorded digitally every day, so is your health If you’ve read Incognito before, you may have come across April, our fictional dummy for privacy related experiments. Last time we saw her, she used an app that was putting all her data on a blockchain, making...

How third party cookies could be putting your company at risk

If you run a site or web app, third-parties can be helpful solutions to problems you don’t want to solve. But, because of the somewhat incongruous way the internet works with regulation, the way you handle third-party cookies could be putting your business at risk. Here are three ways in...

Cookie management: how to get closer to GDPR compliance

Cookie management is tough — it’s very likely that you need to use cookies, but you don’t want to upset your users or risk a fine. Achieving 100% compliance is an unrealistic goal. As a start, ask yourself these three questions: Are unessential cookies being set before you get user...

How websites with free content make money

Nowadays things like dictionaries are digitised and free (if you mean money) In the dark simple times of pre-internet, if you wanted to know what the word ‘ostensibly’ meant, you had to go to your book shelf (yes that’s right, everyone had one) and pull out a dictionary which you...

Google just acquired Fitbit

Which means they also acquired the health data points of 28m users People loved Fitbit because it was easy to use and affordable, but now they might just be throwing them in the bin in the name of privacy concerns. The thing about wearables like Fitbit is that they are...

The best privacy tools for developers 2020

2019 has seen some interesting — and scary — developments in data privacy. Here are some tools to help you navigate this. Sometimes it feels like the only way is to collect absolutely every single data point you can and a user. However, we want to show that there are...

What would happen if everyone deleted Facebook?

On the 15th of October 2019, #deletefacebook was the most popular hashtag on Twitter. But why? During this time, it was revealed that Mark Zuckerberg was having off-record meetings with conservative journalists in the US. Essentially what this did was prompt a new wave of distrust to wash over communities...

Four ways privacy will change in the future

In just one year, data privacy has changed the landscape of the internet — this change is not over. Solve this problem: you’re a secret agent, and you need to record a conversation happening in a room that you cannot break into. You can see into the room, but you...

5 Common Myths about Cookie Consent

Here’s what you need to know about cookie consent — without having to read the GDPR Navigating the world of cookie consent is super hard. We’ve come across common misconceptions in regards to cookie consent — here are the top 5. By having a cookie banner, you are GDPR compliant...

Breaking up big tech: does it need to happen?

Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple provide great services — but do they have too much power? Recently, both Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren called for big tech companies to be broken up. They sit pretty much on opposite ends of the political spectrum — the fact that they agree on...

Libra just established its board of directors... but is it all over already?

eBay, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, and Stripe just dropped out of the Libra Association In short, Libra is a cryptocurrency set up by Facebook — but it’s more complicated than that. The first thing to remember about Libra is that it’s a way to have access to money without a bank...

Planet49: what new cookie legislation means for you

A couple of weeks ago, the EU Court Of Justice made this significant ruling on cookie consent. The ruling reads that “Storing cookies requires internet users’ active consent. A pre-ticked checkbox is therefore insufficient”. This means that when you visit a website, and they ask if you’re okay with cookies,...

California's privacy regulation is coming: which states are next?

So far 2019 has seen a surge in US bills relating privacy at a state level — which states, and what bills? State laws in the US are usually more specific than federal laws because they are sort of plugging the gaps that federal laws may not have accounted for....

What is biometric data?

It’s the most personal data you have — and it’s being used by private companies. Biometric data is produced from pretty much anything to do with your body: your face, your iris, your fingerprint. And then even stuff like the way you stand, the way you move, your voice, and...

Privacy is not dead: it's possible we never had it to begin with

Privacy is a concept that is only 150 years old — but have we been maintaining a lie? Using a clock to time travel — screenshot from Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared Incognito mainly focuses on looking to the future (you know
 privacy and technology and what not), but on...

Smart devices: how everything in your house is watching you

Is ‘smart’ not just another word for ‘unwanted surveillance’? Consider this: you buy a nice shiny new pair of headphones. When you unbox the headphones there’s a manual that says ‘download our app to set up’. So you get the app, you create an account, you connect your headphones. You...

Quick guide to the California Consumer Protection Act

The CCPA: it’s coming soon, but hardly anyone really knows what it is The California Consumer Protection Act will go into effect on the 1st of January 2020. Interestingly, it’s aimed solely at for-profit businesses. This is a key difference between the CCPA and the GDPR; there are a lot...

EU court of justice make pivotal cookie ruling

Pre-checked boxes are now unlawful — here’s a quick summary of what this ruling means Today, the EU’s highest court said this: In today’s judgment, the Court decides that the consent which a website user must give to the storage of and access to cookies on his or her equipment...

Amazon are not above the law — they make their own laws

Amazon want to write the law on facial recognition Recently we wrote a little piece about Ring’s dealings with various police departments in the USA; Ring, who are owned by Amazon, make smart doorbells for households. One of the ‘smart’ features is a camera with facial recognition software. Users of...

Is it okay to store data on a blockchain under GDPR?

Blockchain is an interesting storage solution for data
 but should you do it? A few months ago I wrote an article about a fictional person called April who lived in a world where all of the data she had ever produced was freely available for her to access whenever she...

I made a completely unlawful website in under an hour

Have a quick look at this delightful single-page website I just made Yes, it’s so basic that it’s hilarious BUT: it also contains over twenty trackers. How is that, and what does it mean? Well, besides dazzling you with its undeniably beautiful design, all features and functionality are brought to...

How is the CCPA different from the GDPR?

The California Consumer Privacy Act is coming on the 1st of January 2020. The GDPR was introduced in the EU in May 2018 — it’s a regulation for organisations to better handle the flow of user data. It also gives controls and rights to users over their data. The CCPA...

Mozilla, Coil, and Creative Commons announce Grant for the Web

At the moment the majority of publishers and content creators need to make their money from collecting user data It turns out it doesn’t have to be that way. Grant for the Web is a fat $100M fund to boost and promote alternative monetisation standards. The models we have right...

COPPA: the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act — explained

A brief outline of the US Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) rule that seeks to protect the data of young children The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (which we will shorten to COPPA from now on) was put in place in 2000 to give parents and guardians more control over how...

Oatmilk and data privacy

25% of Britons now consume plant-based milk as demand for cow’s milk continues to fall. Why? It’s not like alternative milk is cheaper or more readily available — in fact it’s the exact opposite of these. Yes it tastes quite good, but the main reason for its increasing popularity is...

How the GDPR is weaponsied

The GDPR was put in place to protect people’s data — unfortunately some players are finding ways to weaponise it. Yes, as if GDPR was not hard enough, we have a few bad actors out there making it harder for the rest of us. Many do not have malicious intent,...

What is behavioural advertising?

It’s the thing that turned the likes of Facebook and Google into giants — free services are also advertising networks Behavioural advertising does what it says on the tin: it’s advertising which is based on your behaviour. Have you ever seen an ad for something you need right now? Or...

*Ring ring*: how enhanced security leads to a lack of privacy

Amazon’s Ring are creating a lucrative pot of consumer data for themselves — all in the name of security. It’s interesting how one way of making yourself or your house more secure would be to get a security guard. That guard would have access to your private property and have...

The UK government want to start centralising data: you cannot undo this by deleting cookies

The government in the UK has started making urgent plans to centralise all user data from gov.uk sites ‘ahead of Brexit’. There are several problems with this, and they don’t all lie on the government’s decision
 🌍 Scraping and centralising data into one place without a good reason is sketchy...

The easiest way to understand cryptography

Sending information over the internet is often encrypted — that means it is only readable to the sender and recipient. So when you send a message to a friend over WhatsApp, the only devices the message is visible in are your phone and your friend’s phone. Asymmetric cryptography is a...

Facebook just released a white paper on data portability

Are they serious, or is this just more privacy posturing? Data portability is where you can take any data you produce for one service, and move it to another. E.g. taking all data away from Facebook, and putting it into a Facebook alternative so you don’t have to ‘start again’....

Google has been using a workaround for GDPR

Johnny Ryan from Brave has found a data-gathering workaround Google have been implementing on 8.4 million sites In the wake of GDPR, Google made (some) effort to stop publishers from using Google’s tools to engage in real-time bidding (RTB), which is a method of broadcasting as much user information as...

Five common data privacy misconceptions

The data privacy space contains many secrets and misconceptions — a lot of the time so that companies can continue to receive healthy torrents of consumer data. Fear not, user of the internet; watch as I demystify this fiendish and confusing space before your very eyes. Remember, the more you...

Regulating the Internet: is it even a good idea?

What do I even mean by ‘regulation’? First of all, let’s get one thing straight: the internet is amazing. If you’ve forgotten why it’s amazing, simply read this very comprehensive love letter and you will once again understand the infinite, wondrous treasure-trove that is our internet. But, through decades of...

Is data consent anonymous?

Some of it is and some of it isn’t. Time to explore, internet users. Everyday you browse the web and (theoretically) manage consent relating to how your data is processed. What many of us are forgetting is that this can be both anonymous and not anonymous. But first, it’s important...

Startups: what does trust look like?

Trust is something you have to earn from your users and from each other Check out this diagram of revolutionary trust-based toilet cubicle. This toilet has no locking door, so if you want to use it you simply have to trust that the person waiting after you will knock before...

Google announce Privacy Sandbox

What is Privacy Sandbox and is it even for real? Google announced this last week on their blog and called it an ‘initiative’, which sounds vague, but could still be the real deal. The reason as to why I am questioning the ‘realness’ of this initiative is that since May...

What are tag managers?

In short, they are something that turns multiple tasks for developers into a single task for marketers Let’s say you run a website that sells shoes. As well as making sure your customers get their shoes, you will probably also want to gather some information such as what shoes they’ve...

Do other cookies have more cookies nested inside?

Good question, with an answer that you may not like: yes. As you may already know, if you run a site, you are responsible for getting consent for any cookies that are dropped by third-parties. So, if you use Intercom for live chat, you need to ask your users if...

Starting Company 2.0

When defining a new market you have to be in it for the long-term. Consider selling organic eggs to a restaurant 10 years ago. At the time that seemed stupid. Restaurants would say to a supplier “why would I buy your organic eggs if they’re twice as expensive as the...

Targeted advertising is dead: a brief intro to contextual advertising

How a pro-privacy, alternative ad network is bringing ethics to the advertising industry We’ve all been there: one moment, you’re buying a new product on Amazon. Then, as little as minutes or as long as months later, you’re scrolling through your Instagram feed and see an ad for the same...

What happens to your data after you die?

Where life is short, the internet’s memory is long. About a month ago I was listening to a podcast called Reply All (it’s interesting and it makes me appear more intelligent at parties — try it, it could do the same for you). Someone called into the show and described...

What are essential cookies?

They are easier to identify than you think ‘Essential cookies’ is not a codified term at all — it’s simply about understanding, and therefore not misidentifying, what ‘essential’ means in this context. It’s fairly simple: anything that sits outside of what is needed to deliver your services to your users...

How Google, Facebook, and Amazon are bringing the internet to the rest of the world

What does this mean? On the surface the internet will be made available for communities who would otherwise go without This is a good thing, right? Yes. End of article. Just kidding, don’t be silly. This new wave of connectivity provided to the world raises many questions: if big tech...

Is free public wifi worth the convenience?

Free online services are extremely convenient. But should we be questioning the ‘free’ part? When a product is free, it’s not a product anymore. You are. We use free services and in exchange we produce buckets of data for companies that we don’t even interact with. Free wifi is an...

A quick guide to cookie consent for startups

The ICO recently wrote a blog post on what good practice is surrounding cookies. One thing they explain several times in this post is that they are not opposed to innovation — but you should not compromise privacy in the name of innovation. They’re right, of course, but the ICO...

How to execute a successful Product Hunt launch 🚀

You just made a cool shiny new product that could change the world Yes, that’s right
 could. You can’t very well bring forth change if no one knows who you are or what your cool new thing is. Product Hunt is an excellent way to shout about it. If you...

Apple join the Data Transfer Project

Apple have just joined a data portability project
 what does this mean? The Data Transfer Project was set up so that internet users can move their data easily between services, if they wish to do so. Main players are Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and now Apple. Why this is good...

A story about legitimate interests

This is a real-life application of ‘legitimate interests’ — read it and marvel at its disturbing flexibility A couple of months ago our CEO Rich had an amazon package delivered while he was out. The delivery person decided to leave it with the Pret A Manger across the road. Therefore,...

A hidden market in the USA: student data

Student data in the US is being harvested for commercial profit — it’s amazing what you can do without transparency. Getting spam is not news. Practically every online activity, from shopping to liking a page on Facebook, leaves a substantial papertrail that data brokers (companies that buy and sell information...

The 'like' button is unlawful: is this the end of the Facebook Pixel?

The EU Court of Justice has finally ruled that Facebook tracking you in secret is unlawful At the moment if you read any blog or news website (not this one, of course) it will likely be laden with social media buttons, so that you can share the wonderful content that...

How Facebook, Google, and Apple are doing privacy

Facebook started in a Harvard dorm room, Apple is just a fruit, and Google isn’t even a word. So how are they going to handle privacy? In March, Mark Zuckerberg wrote this painfully long blog post on how Facebook are pivoting to privacy. Let me just get one thing out...

Getting space from London: what we learned on our week away

We are having a growth spurt, and on the other side is Company 2.0 The last few months at Company have been extremely exciting. So this week we’ve taken the time to figure out what Company 2.0 is going to look like. By the time it gets to Monday, we...

Not all third-party tools are evil

It seems like every week there is another privacy scandal hitting the news. They have become so common that many don’t even make the front page any more. Whether it’s giants like Facebook selling your data to a political campaign, dating apps like Grindr sharing its users’ medical data, or...

Funding and fines, breaches and spies

đŸ™‹đŸ»â€â™€ïž Happy Monday, internet users 👉 a sweet cash injection for privacy 👉 it’s ICO fine season 👉 cool your jets đŸ‘©â€đŸ’» Seen on the web-nets: surveillance has shown us how nice we are
? Have you heard of the bystander effect? Where someone is in trouble in public, and people...

Making your business ethical with data: harder than you think

Listen, try doing a startup that’s completely ethical with data — I dare you. Because it’s hard, okay. Even for us at Company. If you want to achieve true data privacy for your customers or users, the space you can exist in on the internet is very small indeed. At...

Crypto is fair and balanced ⚖

đŸ™‹đŸ»â€â™€ïž Happy Monday, internet users 👉 ÂŁ$ÂąLibra is coming 👉 a better virtual assistant 👉 and the ICO are
 not GDPR compliant? đŸ‘©â€đŸ’» Seen on the web-nets: Surprise, it’s Alexa! An interesting take on consent: when you buy a new piece of hardware and do not quite notice that it...

Sorry I can't talk, I'm being private

This week is WWDC, and Apple are getting super hard for #privacy. Thank you for finally catching up — I’ve been hard for privacy for longer than it takes to read and understand the GDPR. Also, Russia are about to see all those dick pics you have sent and/or receivedđŸ˜±...

'Oh no, technology is getting out of control'

Don’t blame technology for all the world’s problems — we’re just humans full of #emotions. It’s our fault. A few weeks ago, this blimp happened And everyone was scared of it, even though it poses absolutely no threat whatsoever. All I can see is a fairly efficient way of delivering...

Did you know you can solve your problems with Cryptocurrency?

Normal money Zucks, become a Libra Facebook are doing this thing where they ‘pivot to privacy’. Some of us think they should have been doing privacy already thus making a pivot unnecessary. Others think that this could be the start of some really encouraging changes. I don’t know where this...

Company's ÂŁ1.4M Seed Round & Other Stories

2019 is proving to be an exciting year for Company At the beginning of the year we closed our ÂŁ1.4M seed round - a testament to the increasing importance of online businesses empowering their customers through transparency and control of data. Now, almost half way through the year, we want...

What is a data trust?

Fun fact about data trusts: they don’t exist yet Data trusts are just an idea — but they one of the more interesting and challenging ideas about data that we’ve come across so far. The point behind a data trust is to extract value from data without being evil. Sounds...

An island of privacy in a sea of data-driven politics: Spain’s 'Friday List'

Its general election season in Spain, and political parties want your data. As a citizen, The Friday List is a tool to re-vindicate your rights over your personal data — to tell lawmakers that they are not to be sold short. Back in December of 2018, Spanish lawyers, academics and...

Looks like we broke the world — to the moon!

đŸŽ” Blue moon, you saw me standing alone with a trillion other humans đŸŽ” When Jeff Bezos woke up one morning and finally realised that we’ve accidentally spent many decades pounding the earth into toxic mulch, he did what any other sane multi-billionaire would do: he announced that we should...

Living in a Panopticon

Greetings reader, here is a short piece of data ethics fiction for you to absorb: Julia is in prison and every morning has ‘cell inspection’ with her cell mate Aubrey. Aubrey has a smell that reminds Julia of old dead leaves but Julia is now used to this because she’s...

Black Holes in our Digital Universe

Our physical universe started from [what seems like] nothing. Over 13.8 billion years the system’s complexity increased — the creation of matter, the building of stars, the construction of solar systems and then, finally, the origination of life. Now, within this complex system that is our physical universe, life seems...

Someone else is in charge of your memories

Sure, you can just ‘remember stuff’ but who has time for that anymore? When we stopped using physical photo albums and started putting our holiday snaps on Facebook, who was in charge of making sure those photos did not get lost? Yes, Facebook. Not you, but a faceless corporation. Don’t...

The New Vocabulary: how we're wrong about 'consent'

The conversation surrounding ‘consent’ in terms of data is dark and messy. Time to get a torch, I think. First thing’s first: what do I even mean when I say ‘data’? Let’s just look at data as information. It could be information about yourself, about someone else, about the colour...

Let's take to the skies!

You’re not crazy, you’re just a Loon Google have been offered a nice pile of money to help with Loon, which is a project that takes the internet into the stratosphere. Sounds like nonsense future-babble, but it’s a real thing. It is essentially a bunch of solar powered low-orbit drones...

You're due for a downgrade: user experience (part one)

The internet, at first: ugly, funny, hard to use And then: sleek and cool And now: ugly, not funny, impossible to use Look at this awesome website. Can you believe the web used to look like this? This is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen, but also the best thing...

Fun coupons

Bavaria: good beer, even better data privacy laws So the Bavarian Data Protection Authority has just ruled that Facebook Custom Audience is actually illegal. This teaches us that breaking the law is really easy as long you do it secretly and you are also a multi-billion dollar corporation. Anyway, people...

Open data: never mind 'ownership', what about access?

Look I’m sorry but the real world really isn’t working for me right now. Please come into this alternate universe with me, and assume the identity of April, our companion from part one of this article. You don’t have to read part one to understand what’s going on in this...

Cookies are a perfect and irresistible distraction from other bad things

While you’ve been having fun blocking cookies, advertising networks have been developing fierce alternatives
 Hopefully you know by now that, in part, cookies are a form of 21st century surveillance. If you’ve never thought about cookies in that way before, it’s fine. Just remember: you are served cookies basically all...

Coming off social media is the new progressive

Being a brand on social media used to be hip and cool. Now it’s just lame and stupid. The timeline of events for brands on social media looks roughly like this: Early stage social media times: Social media is just for individuals
 instagram doesn’t even exist yet
 why would Oreos...

AOC quits Facebook, Facebook quits privacy

Oh, you’re not on Facebook? I’m too busy to indulge you about why that is right now
 The other day, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decided to quit Facebook. You may ask, “why is this any different to any other person who decides to stop using Facebook?” Duh, because she’s a politician. And...

A Company retro

The last 6 weeks have been a blast for Company. We’ve grown as a team, released our maiden product, and our launch event at Newspeak House was a fantastic success. But as with any startup, we face challenges and saviour successes. So we thought, hey, transparency is our bread and...

'Your data' does not exist

There’s an ugly, complex, tangle of common misconceptions about your data that I will now explain to you so please pay attention. After GDPR the likes of Facebook and Google were all like “woo power to the people, you all own your data now!” Haha, great. Except not, because: they’re...

9 Privacy Tools You Should Know About

Ugh WHY is privacy so hard? It’s becoming more and more obvious that the masters of the internet (Google, Facebook, Amazon, anyone else like that) are in no rush to begin valuing your privacy. While we wait for them to change their minds about that (lol), here are some tools...

Regulate, regulate, regulate

Lush: clean offline and online “Cruelty-free soap that smells nice and comes in cool packaging is great, but why does it need to be on social media?” Pff, that sounds like an attitude from 2006. Being a brand on social media shows that you know what you’re doing and you...

Zombie cookies: cookies that just won't die

You may already know a decent amount about what cookies are because of this other article that we wrote. If you haven’t read it yet and don’t have time, there are two simple facts about cookies that you should know: First simple fact: cookies track your browsing habits so that...

Welcome To Company

Our mission is to create transparent and trustworthy online experiences. Company is the best way for websites and mobile apps to meet modern data privacy standards. Forward thinking businesses use Company to comply with privacy regulations and to give their users a modern, transparent and trustworthy online experience. How are...

Help, I don't know what cookies are

That’s great, I’m so glad you said that. Hardly anyone really knows what they are. But it’s okay to not know. The first step is admitting it. Well done. You’re obviously here because what you do know is this: cookies are important, but cookies are confusing. Don’t worry - I...

Data Ethics: the unsexiest cult ever?

Every day we see a new story about how Google or Facebook or some hotel we stayed in once 10 years ago misusing/misplacing our data. It’s not because they’re all evil (mostly), it’s because it’s a hard problem to solve. Really hard. The internet has been built for almost three...

A love letter

I was born in 1996. When I was 4, my dad bought a computer on finance. It cost him £1200 over a two year period, and by today’s standards was pretty shit. Specs aside, it was probably the best headstart I could ever receive in life. Every day after school...

The Most Devastating Pixel on The Internet

Facebook is tracking you on over 8.4 million websites
 and there’s very little any of us do about it. It all comes down to the most powerful pixel on the planet
 The Facebook Pixel. I hear you
 “how can a simple pixel be so consequential?” Companies want to optimize their...

Blimpy McBlimpface

Keep an eye on your third parties, because otherwise
 540 million Facebook profiles have been stored openly on AWS by Cultura Colectiva. Right okay
 there are multiple organisations at fault here, but look at it in this order: Cultura Colectiva are a digital media publisher based in Mexico. They publish...

The Customer-Centric Dilemma

In 2012, Jeff Bezos said to his shareholders: “When we’re at our best, we don’t wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to. We lower prices and increase value for customers before we have to. We invent before...

How To Make A Data Request

Step 1: just don’t Step 2: read this article, live normal life Yes exactly, making a data request is a bit like asking if you can carry around a bit of paper with your name, age, and hair colour on it. You already know that stuff, why do you need...

This isn't fair, Dragonflies were just meant to be pretty

An Apple, but metal and shaped like a credit card Apple have just announced the release of a bunch of new products, but most interesting of which is the Apple Card. It’s a credit card, made of metal, that shows ONLY your name. What future magic is this? How can...

RTB: fast, secret auctions with your data.

RTB stands for real-time bidding. If you like browsing - which I’m sure you do, you browsed to this article, after all - you have been subject to RTB many, many times. Just think back to the last time you had this thought: ‘wow I really want to visit that...

I spoke to over 50 DPOs, here's what I learned...

Over the past 3 months I have spoken to over 50 Data Protection Officers at large B2C companies across the pharmaceutical, finance, technology, media, health care, and telco industries. Here are my 5 key takeaways: (N.B.: This isn’t a survey commissioned by some big corporate to make things seem incredibly...

Facebook: Oh shit, is plaintext not okay?

“One porn, please” By next month in the UK, if you want to watch porn you’ll have to prove you’re over 18 by providing ID to your porn site of choice. Law makers kept this one quiet didn’t they? Alternatively, you can purchase a porn pass from the newsagent, and...

How Facebook Have Built Up Your Trust Over The Years

Joke’s on you: turns out they haven’t done that at all
 Great so now you have the below list ready to pull out should you forget about the shadowy aura of mistrust Mark Zuckerberg has slathered all over the internet in the last 15 years. Click on any of the...

Can the big five please stop being so damn big? Thanks

When three become one, privacy becomes
 none. This week has been mostly about how Mark Zuckerberg wants to merge together all three of his ‘let’s have a private conversation now’ apps. So that’s Facebook Messenger, Instagram messenger, and Whatsapp. He says this is all in the name of privacy and...