#Privacy

The recent changes in Facebook’s privacy policies are civil rights eroding and a maze of complexity in my personal opinion. Even being careful, using this bookmarklet showed me I was still leaking information despite my best intentions at plugging all the holes. So, if you value your privacy I really advise using it to make sure you’re sharing only what you want to share (and particularly now that your friends can inadvertently share information about you you wouldn’t want being shared).

Bless the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Always doing some awesome work, they’ve put out a great piece on digital self defence.

6 Ideas For Those Needing Defensive Technology to Protect Free Speech from Authoritarian Regimes and 4 Ways the Rest of Us Can Help

Of course, authoritarian regimes can be widely interpreted here. Personally, I think the UK has gone off the deep end with both the way its using laws and its over-zealous database creation. And let’s face it, any country thinking of putting internet filters on your information is not that much further away (yes, I’m looking at you Australia and NZ) to say nothing of unapologetic offenders like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Great op-ed piece worth reading by perhaps America’s foremost security expert, Bruce Schneier, on the DHS security warnings (Department of Homeland Security, for the non-US acronym followers) and their actual effect in terms of security (zero) versus the effect on the populace (fear). Short, pulls no punches and questions the political motivation of the entire system.

There are two basic ways to terrorize people. The first is to do something spectacularly horrible, like flying airplanes into skyscrapers and killing thousands of people. The second is to keep people living in fear.