Last August, the Israelis crashed a private spacecraft on the moon. One of the items carried by the craft and now potentially spread across a small region of the moon was a container of tardigrades, tiny animals known as water bears, which can become dormant and live in […]
The Covid-19 pandemic has ushered calls for extraordinary surveillance methods. The Israeli government, for example, approved a proposal to allow the Shin Bet security service to perform mass surveillance on Israelis’ phones without requiring a court order to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. But while this crisis may […]
Who wants to screw up a win-win-win arrangement? Unsurprisingly, European regulators. Imagine that one person provides the vast majority of your food for twenty years. For free. And now imagine that this person profits from this act because her work with you and many others allow her to […]
A war is coming. The CCPA has driven a wedge into fissures in the information economy and companies are beginning to see how deeply they will be harmed by the new rules. They are beginning to fight back. We are seeing the first salvos, but I fully expect […]
As our society moves forward in a time of novel coronavirus we begin to improve the tools available to fight the virus. I wrote earlier about the many ways that tracking and fighting an epidemic conflict with attempts to protect personal privacy, but new attempts are being developed […]
Emergence of Zoom The Coronavirus has forced millions of people around the world to work from home, and adapt to a professional and social culture that does not permit in-person interaction. As a result, many have turned to Zoom’s videoconferencing platform for virtual meetings, e-classrooms, virtual happy hours, […]
Companies called out for bad behavior often misdirect the conversation by saying – “Yes, but we do good things too!” The worst defense of bad behavior ventured by any company, in my opinion, is “Yes we are loathsome, but we create jobs.” Jobs are good, don’t get me […]
Many of us have not read about China’s near-nationalization of payment and chat apps to fight the spread of COVID-19. Widely-reported but little noticed, China has required citizens to use software on the chat and payment apps WeChat and Alipay that dictates whether they should be quarantined or […]
A privacy bill was signed into law in Maine last year and is set to go into effect in July. That is—unless a group of ISP trade associations has something to say about it. The new law would regulate the use, disclosure, and sale of customer information by […]
Electronic technology is protecting us from COVID-19, but is it violating our privacy? Individuals and institutions are taking drastic measures to flatten the curve of COVID-19 infections, and these measures, while important, may threaten our recently recognized privacy rights. This article examines the efforts taken to protect our […]
