MailTrackerBlocker
I use Apple’s Mail app for my email so this is very handy:
An email tracker, read receipt and spy pixel blocker plugin for macOS Apple Mail.
Link tags: surveillance
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Introducing State Partitioning - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog
This is a terrific approach to tackling cross-site surveillance. I’d love it to be implemented in all browsers. I can imagine Safari implementing this. Chrome …we’ll see.
supercookie • workwise
Favicons are snitches.
Why The IndieWeb? (Webbed Briefs)
Heydon keeps on producing more caustically funny videos that are made for me. After the last one about progressive enhancement, this one is about the indie web.
This is the story of the birth of the web, its loss of innocence, its decline, and what we can do to make it a bit less gross.
Global Privacy Control — Take Control Of Your Privacy
This sounds a lot like Do Not Track …but looking at the spec, the interesting part is the way that this is designed to work in combination with legal frameworks. That’s smart. I don’t think a purely technical solution is workable (as we saw with Do Not Track).
Simple Analytics - Simple, clean, and privacy-friendly analytics
Another nice alternative to Google Analytics with a focus on privacy.
Contextual ads | Dave Smyth
If behavioural ads aren’t more effective than contextual ads, what is all of that data collected for?
If websites opted for a context ads and privacy-focused analytics approach, cookie banners could become obsolete…
Facebook’s Attempt to Vilify Apple — Pixel Envy
See, that’s what I’m talking about;
Levy deftly conflates “advertising” and “personalized advertising”, as if there are no ways to target people planning a wedding without surveilling their web browsing behaviour. Facebook’s campaign casually ignores decades of advertising targeted based on the current webpage or video instead of who those people are because it would impact Facebook’s primary business. Most people who are reading an article about great wedding venues are probably planning a wedding, but you don’t need quite as much of the ad tech stack to make that work.
No cookie for you - The GitHub Blog
I wish more companies would realise that this is a perfectly reasonable approach to take:
We decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really. 🤔
So, we have removed all non-essential cookies from GitHub, and visiting our website does not send any information to third-party analytics services.
Why The Web Is Such A Mess - YouTube
Tom gives a succinct history of the ongoing arms race between trackers and end users.
Coded Bias Official Trailer on Vimeo
Coded Bias follows MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery that many facial recognition technologies fail more often on darker-skinned faces, and delves into an investigation of widespread bias in artificial intelligence.
Plausible Analytics | Simple, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics
Another alternative to Google Analytics—nice and lightweight too!
Phantom Analyzer
A simple, real-time website scanner to see what invisible creepers are lurking in the shadows and collecting information about you.
Looks good for adactio.com, thesession.org, and huffduffer.com …but clearleft.com is letting the side down.
How To Protect Your Privacy Online In 8 Tips : Life Kit : NPR
Take a look at your smartphone and delete all the apps you don’t really need. For many tasks, you can use a browser on your phone instead of an app.
Privacy-wise, browsers are preferable, because they can’t access as much of your information as an app can.
Blacklight – The Markup
This is an excellent new tool for showing exactly what kind of tracking a site is doing:
Who is peeking over your shoulder while you work, watch videos, learn, explore, and shop on the internet? Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data. You may be surprised at what you learn.
Best of all, you can inspect the raw data and analyse the methodology.
There are some accompanying explainers:
Daring Fireball: Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy
Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it. They talk in circles but their argument boils down to entitlement: they think our privacy is theirs for the taking because they’ve been getting away with taking it without our knowledge, and it is valuable.
Measuring Performance behind consent popups – Simon Hearne
- Opted out experiences are ~35% faster
- Opting in downloads 2.5MB of additional JavaScript
- Opted in repeat views are twice as slow as opted out
Employee-surveillance software is not welcome to integrate with Basecamp - Signal v. Noise
Look, employers are always free to – and should! – evaluate the work product produced by employees. But they don’t have to surveil someone’s every move or screenshot their computer every five minutes to do so. That’s monitoring the inputs. Monitor the outputs instead, and you’ll have a much healthier, saner relationship.
If you hire smart, capable people and trust them to do good work – surprise-surprise – people will return the sentiment deliver just that! The irony of setting up these invasive surveillance regimes is that they end up causing the motivation to goof off to beat the very systems that were setup to catch such behavior.
The beauty of modern mobile websites · Pushing Pixels
Two observations of websites on mobile devices today:
- They are beautifully designed, with great typography, clear branding, all optimized for readability.
- I had to install Firefox, Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin, as well as manually select and remove additional elements such as subscription overlays.
Both observations are the result of conscious design decisions.
The Markup
A new online publication from Julia Angwin:
Big Tech Is Watching You. We’re Watching Big Tech.