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With the popularity of generative AI, it's becoming more and more difficult to distinguish reality from fiction. Can this problem be solved using cryptography? What are the privacy implications of the currently proposed systems?
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If you, like myself, have been inhabiting the internet for a few decades, you're probably familiar with the old adage IRL: In Real Life.
The acronym was used a lot when the distinction between online life and offline life was much greater than it is now. In today's world, can we really keep referring to our digital life as being somehow disconnected from our "real life"?
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Contrary to what some policymakers seem to believe, whether naively or maliciously, encryption is not a crime. Anyone asserting encryption is a tool for crime is either painfully misinformed or is attempting to manipulate legislators to gain oppressive power over the people.
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In the digital age, nothing is more important than convenience and easy access to data. Unfortunately, there has been an alarming trend among technologists to implement End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) in their applications, to the detriment of all the important work being done by countless organizations, including the best and brightest intelligence agencies and big tech companies.
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In my work as a privacy advocate, I regularly encounter two types of discourse that I find very damaging to privacy as a whole. The first one is the idea that privacy is dead, implying it's not worth putting any effort to protect personal data anymore. This is the abdication mindset. This attitude is the one that scares me the most because without giving it a fight then of course the battle is lost in advance. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, privacy is dead if you let it die.
The concept of a progressive web app is enticing: an application using web technologies that is inherently cross-platform (since it runs in a browser) and acts like a native app, even functioning offline. Support for PWAs in traditionally locked-down platforms like iOS means that PWAs can give users the freedom to install apps without having to go through Apple’s App Store. But there are problems with web content that PWAs haven't solved.
Multi-Party Relays (MPRs) are a technology that aims to provide better privacy protections than VPNs do. MPRs showed a lot of promise when they first emerged, but years later there are fewer options than ever. What happened?
Silicon Valley could well be built on the principle of scrapping principles. Now Elon Musk, perhaps the ultimate tech bro, is shredding another well-regarded convention with an original business strategy.
Privacy advocates have been calling for the United States to adopt strong consumer privacy protection laws along the lines of the EU's GDPR for a long time now, but the proposed Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act isn't the answer we're looking for.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attack on the United States, the US government enacted laws that weakened citizen privacy in the name of national emergency. This sent up many red flags for human rights and privacy advocates.