If you update or add Micropolicies, your website visitors will be seamlessly notified đ Whatâs different here? As you can see from the above, any new Micropolicies will show a green ânewâ and any existing Micropolicies that youâve made changes to will show âupdatedâ in orange. How it works: Once...
Is there truly such a thing as anonymised data? Disclaimer: this post is about GDPR. If youâre looking for the latest in paper-based fingerprinting techniques to accelerate your retro print marketing startup, youâre in the wrong place. You probably already know what GDPR is (unless youâve been living under a...
To detect fraudulent or malicious actors, websites use techniques such as third-party trackers to identify an individualâs 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...
Yes, SDKs are useful, but think twice about what youâre 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...
The ten obstacles you could be faced with, and how to overcome them. In todayâs privacy-first world, the stakes have never been higher for handling user data. Increasing GDPR fines, new regulations like the CCPA, and elevating consumer expectationsâââmissing basic privacy controls could kill your business. But with a product to...
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...
If youâre 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 donât understand what your Micropolicies are even saying đ€«. A Micropolicy tells your users: What data you are collecting Why you are collecting...
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 â get it? Thatâs the name out of the way. More importantly: why did we decide to build this, and why did it take us...
Donât 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: đ The responsibility...
Essentially, a Micropolicy is an âatomic unitâ of a privacy policy Itâs 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...
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 ânoâ button at the top level: Yes, we added a ânoâ button. This decision was important, and...
Arenât you sick of seeing these every time you visit a new website? Quite right, you should be sick of them â 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...
Itâs not enough to tell your users that you want to set cookies â 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...
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 â not all at once upon visiting your site. This adheres much more closely to GDPR standards because your...
Wow, that decade flew by faster than a self-driving car⊠âŠwhich is only about 10mph at the moment. If you somehow can remember as far back as 2010, youâll know that no one was barking at Alexa to turn on the radio, or worried that their doorbell might be wrongfully...
The world of online advertising is confusing and abstract, so letâs 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...
Put down your coffee and look at this scan result from TrackerTracker: This result is just from the homepage of Enfield Councilâs website â subpages may contain additional cookies These are scan results from the Enfield Councilâs website â they set quite a lot of cookies without asking first, and...
Hereâs how Big Techâs 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 â whose business models revolve around the exploitation of user data â to make some changes. But are these changes only...
Thereâs 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...
Weâve automated the blocking of third-party scripts for you with Autoblock đ Autoblock is in early beta stages at the moment, but weâre 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...
Health data is arguably the most valuable data we have â which is why companies want it We all know that thereâs a lot of money in health, because humans have frail, sensitive bodies which are prone to disease and ageing â all of us need to access healthcare at...
The current rhetoric is that data privacy is something you should care about â 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...
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...
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...
Now that all the Cybertruck excitement has died down, letâs take a look at what Elon Muskâs 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. Theyâre doing this in...
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: Itâs still in draft mode and the regulation is not yet in effect Its rules concerning cookie consent are a lot...
Is the cost of refusal greater than the cost of participation? Hereâs 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 â in...
The phrase âwe value your privacyâ smeared across the top of a cookie banner no longer has any meaning Hereâs Buzzfeedâs cookie banner after you click through to get to your preferences â they say that they value my privacy, yet have provided a list of data-gathering companies with obscure...
Theyâd 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. âïž How this new marketing tool works: instead of tracking users...
At Company, we spend 95% of our time thinking about the flow of user data⊠âŠand 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...
Weâve made changes to how you set up your Company Cookie Widget Weâve made it even quicker and easier to get our Cookie Widget on your site â hereâs what we did and why we did it. Firstly, when you sign up you can tell us more about the organisation...
If all your behaviour is recorded digitally every day, so is your health If youâve 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...
If you run a site or web app, third-parties can be helpful solutions to problems you donât 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 is tough â itâs very likely that you need to use cookies, but you donât 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...
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 âostensiblyâ meant, you had to go to your book shelf (yes thatâs right, everyone had one) and pull out a dictionary which you...
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...
2019 has seen some interesting â and scary â 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...
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...
In just one year, data privacy has changed the landscape of the internet â this change is not over. Solve this problem: youâre 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...
Hereâs what you need to know about cookie consent â without having to read the GDPR Navigating the world of cookie consent is super hard. Weâve come across common misconceptions in regards to cookie consent â here are the top 5. By having a cookie banner, you are GDPR compliant...
Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple provide great services â 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 â the fact that they agree on...
eBay, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, and Stripe just dropped out of the Libra Association In short, Libra is a cryptocurrency set up by Facebook â but itâs more complicated than that. The first thing to remember about Libra is that itâs a way to have access to money without a bank...
A couple of weeks ago, the EU Court Of Justice made this significant ruling on cookie consent. The ruling reads that âStoring cookies requires internet usersâ active consent. A pre-ticked checkbox is therefore insufficientâ. This means that when you visit a website, and they ask if youâre okay with cookies,...
So far 2019 has seen a surge in US bills relating privacy at a state level â 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....
Itâs the most personal data you have â and itâs 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 a concept that is only 150 years old â but have we been maintaining a lie? Using a clock to time travel â screenshot from Donât Hug Me Iâm Scared Incognito mainly focuses on looking to the future (you know⊠privacy and technology and what not), but on...
Is âsmartâ not just another word for âunwanted surveillanceâ? Consider this: you buy a nice shiny new pair of headphones. When you unbox the headphones thereâs a manual that says âdownload our app to set upâ. So you get the app, you create an account, you connect your headphones. You...
The CCPA: itâs 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, itâs aimed solely at for-profit businesses. This is a key difference between the CCPA and the GDPR; there are a lot...
Pre-checked boxes are now unlawful â hereâs a quick summary of what this ruling means Today, the EUâs highest court said this: In todayâs 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 want to write the law on facial recognition Recently we wrote a little piece about Ringâs dealings with various police departments in the USA; Ring, who are owned by Amazon, make smart doorbells for households. One of the âsmartâ features is a camera with facial recognition software. Users of...
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...
Have a quick look at this delightful single-page website I just made Yes, itâs so basic that itâs 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...
The California Consumer Privacy Act is coming on the 1st of January 2020. The GDPR was introduced in the EU in May 2018 â itâs 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...
At the moment the majority of publishers and content creators need to make their money from collecting user data It turns out it doesnât 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...
A brief outline of the US Federal Trade Commissionâs (FTC) rule that seeks to protect the data of young children The Childrenâs 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...
25% of Britons now consume plant-based milk as demand for cowâs milk continues to fall. Why? Itâs not like alternative milk is cheaper or more readily available â in fact itâs the exact opposite of these. Yes it tastes quite good, but the main reason for its increasing popularity is...
The GDPR was put in place to protect peopleâs data â 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,...
Itâs the thing that turned the likes of Facebook and Google into giants â free services are also advertising networks Behavioural advertising does what it says on the tin: itâs advertising which is based on your behaviour. Have you ever seen an ad for something you need right now? Or...
Amazonâs Ring are creating a lucrative pot of consumer data for themselves â all in the name of security. Itâs 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 government in the UK has started making urgent plans to centralise all user data from gov.uk sites âahead of Brexitâ. There are several problems with this, and they donât all lie on the governmentâs decision⊠đ Scraping and centralising data into one place without a good reason is sketchy...
Sending information over the internet is often encrypted â 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 friendâs phone. Asymmetric cryptography is a...
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 donât have to âstart againâ....
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 Googleâs tools to engage in real-time bidding (RTB), which is a method of broadcasting as much user information as...
The data privacy space contains many secrets and misconceptions â 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...
What do I even mean by âregulationâ? First of all, letâs get one thing straight: the internet is amazing. If youâve forgotten why itâs 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...
Some of it is and some of it isnât. 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, itâs important...
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...
What is Privacy Sandbox and is it even for real? Google announced this last week on their blog and called it an âinitiativeâ, which sounds vague, but could still be the real deal. The reason as to why I am questioning the ârealnessâ of this initiative is that since May...
In short, they are something that turns multiple tasks for developers into a single task for marketers Letâs 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 theyâve...
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...
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 âwhy would I buy your organic eggs if theyâre twice as expensive as the...
How a pro-privacy, alternative ad network is bringing ethics to the advertising industry Weâve all been there: one moment, youâre buying a new product on Amazon. Then, as little as minutes or as long as months later, youâre scrolling through your Instagram feed and see an ad for the same...
Where life is short, the internetâs memory is long. About a month ago I was listening to a podcast called Reply All (itâs interesting and it makes me appear more intelligent at parties â try it, it could do the same for you). Someone called into the show and described...
They are easier to identify than you think âEssential cookiesâ is not a codified term at all â itâs simply about understanding, and therefore not misidentifying, what âessentialâ means in this context. Itâs fairly simple: anything that sits outside of what is needed to deliver your services to your users...
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, donât be silly. This new wave of connectivity provided to the world raises many questions: if big tech...
Free online services are extremely convenient. But should we be questioning the âfreeâ part? When a product is free, itâs not a product anymore. You are. We use free services and in exchange we produce buckets of data for companies that we donât even interact with. Free wifi is an...
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 â but you should not compromise privacy in the name of innovation. Theyâre right, of course, but the ICO...
You just made a cool shiny new product that could change the world Yes, thatâs right⊠could. You canât 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 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...
This is a real-life application of âlegitimate interestsâ â 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,...
Student data in the US is being harvested for commercial profit â itâs 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 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...
Facebook started in a Harvard dorm room, Apple is just a fruit, and Google isnât 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...
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 weâve taken the time to figure out what Company 2.0 is going to look like. By the time it gets to Monday, we...
It seems like every week there is another privacy scandal hitting the news. They have become so common that many donât even make the front page any more. Whether itâs giants like Facebook selling your data to a political campaign, dating apps like Grindr sharing its usersâ medical data, or...
đđ»ââïž Happy Monday, internet users đ a sweet cash injection for privacy đ itâs ICO fine season đ cool your jets đ©âđ» Seen on the web-nets: surveillance has shown us how nice we areâŠ? Have you heard of the bystander effect? Where someone is in trouble in public, and people...
Listen, try doing a startup thatâs completely ethical with data â I dare you. Because itâs 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...
đđ»ââïž Happy Monday, internet users đ ÂŁ$ÂąLibra is coming đ a better virtual assistant đ and the ICO are⊠not GDPR compliant? đ©âđ» Seen on the web-nets: Surprise, itâs Alexa! An interesting take on consent: when you buy a new piece of hardware and do not quite notice that it...
This week is WWDC, and Apple are getting super hard for #privacy. Thank you for finally catching up â Iâve 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 receivedđ±...
Donât blame technology for all the worldâs problems â weâre just humans full of #emotions. Itâs 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...
Normal money Zucks, become a Libra Facebook are doing this thing where they âpivot to privacyâ. 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 donât know where this...
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...
Fun fact about data trusts: they donât exist yet Data trusts are just an idea â but they one of the more interesting and challenging ideas about data that weâve come across so far. The point behind a data trust is to extract value from data without being evil. Sounds...
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 â to tell lawmakers that they are not to be sold short. Back in December of 2018, Spanish lawyers, academics and...
đ” Blue moon, you saw me standing alone with a trillion other humans đ” When Jeff Bezos woke up one morning and finally realised that weâve 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...
Greetings reader, here is a short piece of data ethics fiction for you to absorb: Julia is in prison and every morning has âcell inspectionâ with her cell mate Aubrey. Aubrey has a smell that reminds Julia of old dead leaves but Julia is now used to this because sheâs...
Our physical universe started from [what seems like] nothing. Over 13.8 billion years the systemâs complexity increased â 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...
Sure, you can just âremember stuffâ 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. Donât...
The conversation surrounding âconsentâ in terms of data is dark and messy. Time to get a torch, I think. First thingâs first: what do I even mean when I say âdataâ? Letâs just look at data as information. It could be information about yourself, about someone else, about the colour...
Youâre not crazy, youâre 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 itâs a real thing. It is essentially a bunch of solar powered low-orbit drones...
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 Iâve ever seen, but also the best thing...
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...
Look Iâm sorry but the real world really isnât 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 donât have to read part one to understand whatâs going on in this...
While youâve 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 youâve never thought about cookies in that way before, itâs fine. Just remember: you are served cookies basically all...
Being a brand on social media used to be hip and cool. Now itâs 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 doesnât even exist yet⊠why would Oreos...
Oh, youâre not on Facebook? Iâm too busy to indulge you about why that is right now⊠The other day, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decided to quit Facebook. You may ask, âwhy is this any different to any other person who decides to stop using Facebook?â Duh, because sheâs a politician. And...
The last 6 weeks have been a blast for Company. Weâve 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...
Thereâs 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 âwoo power to the people, you all own your data now!â Haha, great. Except not, because: theyâre...
Ugh WHY is privacy so hard? Itâs 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...
Lush: clean offline and online âCruelty-free soap that smells nice and comes in cool packaging is great, but why does it need to be on social media?â Pff, that sounds like an attitude from 2006. Being a brand on social media shows that you know what youâre doing and you...
You may already know a decent amount about what cookies are because of this other article that we wrote. If you havenât read it yet and donât have time, there are two simple facts about cookies that you should know: First simple fact: cookies track your browsing habits so that...
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...
Thatâs great, Iâm so glad you said that. Hardly anyone really knows what they are. But itâs okay to not know. The first step is admitting it. Well done. Youâre obviously here because what you do know is this: cookies are important, but cookies are confusing. Donât worry - I...
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. Itâs not because theyâre all evil (mostly), itâs because itâs a hard problem to solve. Really hard. The internet has been built for almost three...
I was born in 1996. When I was 4, my dad bought a computer on finance. It cost him ÂŁ1200 over a two year period, and by todayâs standards was pretty shit. Specs aside, it was probably the best headstart I could ever receive in life. Every day after school...
Facebook is tracking you on over 8.4 million websites⊠and thereâs 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⊠âhow can a simple pixel be so consequential?â Companies want to optimize their...
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...
In 2012, Jeff Bezos said to his shareholders: âWhen weâre at our best, we donât 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...
Step 1: just donât 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...
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. Itâs a credit card, made of metal, that shows ONLY your name. What future magic is this? How can...
RTB stands for real-time bidding. If you like browsing - which Iâm 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: âwow I really want to visit that...
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 isnât a survey commissioned by some big corporate to make things seem incredibly...
âOne porn, pleaseâ By next month in the UK, if you want to watch porn youâll have to prove youâre over 18 by providing ID to your porn site of choice. Law makers kept this one quiet didnât they? Alternatively, you can purchase a porn pass from the newsagent, and...
Jokeâs on you: turns out they havenât 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...
When three become one, privacy becomes⊠none. This week has been mostly about how Mark Zuckerberg wants to merge together all three of his âletâs have a private conversation nowâ apps. So thatâs Facebook Messenger, Instagram messenger, and Whatsapp. He says this is all in the name of privacy and...