Before Google’s latest privacy change announcement this past summer, the search engine giant promised its users that it would prioritize their online privacy and keep their personal information safe from browsing data collected by Gmail and other sources. Despite this assurance, on June 28, Google changed its privacy stance and is now requesting account owners choose to share more personal data.

This study compares the accuracy of human and computer-based personality judgments, using a sample of 86,220 volunteers who completed a 100-item personality questionnaire. We show that (i) computer predictions based on a generic digital footprint (Facebook Likes) are more accurate (r = 0.56) than those made by the participants’ Facebook friends using a personality questionnaire (r = 0.49

What does Google know about me? How do they find out? And what steps can I take to protect myself and my personal data?

What does Google know about me? How do they find out? And what steps can I take to protect myself and my personal data?

Amazon’s voice-controlled personal assistant is creating chaos for people called Alexis, Alex and Alexa; TV sitcom tried to order milk

The containers feature is enabled in Firefox Nightly 50 by default with the about:config pref privacy.userContext.enabled set to true. When enabled, containers will integrate seamlessly into your current browsing experience. You will have the option to open entirely new browsing contexts, which will have their browser storage (such as cookies or localStorage) separated from other containers. Your normal tabs, which we consider to exist in the default container, will still look and act as you'd expect them to before enabling containers.

Container tabs operate just as you would expect a normal tab to, except for the fact that the sites you visit will have access to a separate slice of the browser's storage. This means your site preferences, logged in sessions, and advertising tracking data won't carry over to the new container. Likewise, any browsing you do within the new container will not affect the preferences, logged in sessions, or tracking data of your other containers.

Facebook, Google+ and Twitter supply official sharing code snippets which quietly siphon personal data from all page visitors. Shariff enables visitors to see how popular your page is on Facebook and share your content with others without needless data leaks.

Shariff (/ˈʃɛɹɪf/) is an open-source, low-maintenance, high-privacy solution maintained by German computer magazine c't and heise online.

The simple way to completely avoid this is to refuse to have a Facebook page. However, a compromise may be possible, one which attracts public support while not boosting Facebook's power much. This article proposes such a compromise.

Facebook is a surveillance engine, accumulating lots of personal data which is also available to the state. For your privacy and freedom's sake, it is important not to have an active Facebook account; refusing blocks Facebook's main channel for collecting information about you and, through you, about your friends and relatives. (Whatsapp, a subsidiary of Facebook, is also important to avoid.) Explaining to them why you firmly insist on routing your communications with them through some other system will strengthen your will power to resist systems that use you to harm you and others.

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The simple way to completely avoid this is to refuse to have a Facebook page. However, a compromise may be possible, one which attracts public support while not boosting Facebook's power much. This article proposes such a compromise.

For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans. A spinoff of a British consulting company and sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes. Respondents — by now hundreds of thousands of us, mostly female and mostly young but enough male and older for the firm to make inferences about others with similar behaviors and demographics — get a free look at their Ocean scores. Cambridge Analytica also gets a look at their scores and, thanks to Facebook, gains access to their profiles and real names.

Privacy advocates warn feds about surreptitious cross-device tracking.

Ultrasounds emitted by ads or JavaScript code hidden on a page accessed through the Tor Browser can deanonymize Tor users by making nearby phones or computers send identity beacons back to advertisers, data which contains sensitive information that state-sponsored actors can easily obtain via a subpoena.

I was surprised to see the Facebook SDK being loaded in the network tab on my blog when I don't have any Facebook buttons. It turned out to be coming courtesy of Disqus. No wonder Facebook knows everywhere you go!

Fluxfonts is a specialized tool that attempts to tackle the privacy concerns raised by the possibility to collect information about the fonts installed on a system. Such information can be used to uniquely identify a system. With Fluxfonts, new fonts are randomly created and removed to prevent the same fingerprint from being recreated.

Font fingerprinting is a technique which is difficult and usually inconvenient for users to circumvent by other means. Fluxfonts is fully automated and runs in the background. By effectively always having a new unique fingerprint, it should prevent a system from being (re‐)identified between applications and web sites/‐browsers.

Facebook claims that no one can intercept WhatsApp messages, not even the company and its staff, ensuring privacy for its billion-plus users. But new research shows that the company could in fact read messages due to the way WhatsApp has implemented its end-to-end encryption protocol.

Although information is anonymized, data miners and brokers can build up detailed dossiers on individual patients by cross-referencing with other sources

Since 2012, Facebook has been working with data brokers to acquire even more information on its users. According to a report from ProPublica, this information can include a user’s income, restaurant habits, and credit card activities.

Combine third party data with what Facebook already knows about its users from using the social network and it is hard to think of any piece of information the company doesn’t have about a person.

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People regularly ask how Facebook, with its massive data management costs, can offer its service for free. The answer is simple, the product is you.