Can an Algorithm Judge You Better Than Your Spouse?
In a recent study, researchers from the University of Cambridge found that, using a new algorithm, a computer can (allegedly) judge your personality better than your closest relatives. Based on Facebook likes, the algorithm scores better than friends or even parents...
One More Way You Can Leave Footprints: Police Body Cameras
Amid concerns about potential use of excessive force by police (focused most recently on the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner), police departments are being encouraged by the U.S. Department of Justice to equip officers with small body-mounted cameras. Some...
The Internet Never Forgets (No Matter Who You Are)
The CFO of Twitter recently made headlines by (apparently) accidentally tweeting information about an upcoming business deal: Get the New York Times story: Twitter’s C.F.O. Suffers a Social Media Faux Pas This event -- and the CFO's inability to take the information...
What Does That Thumb’s-Up Icon Reveal?
What can a computer figure out about a human? Not just where you are and how you spend your money, but what kind of person you are. One intriguing study last year showed correlations between what people Liked on Facebook and various demographic factors, personal...
What’s in a “Real” Name?
Facebook's "real name" policy has been in the news recently due to a rash of account suspensions and threatened deletions where the account-holders are transgender and using their chosen rather than their legal names -- apparently the result of targeted flagging by...
What Happens When the Government Wants Your Data?
Every year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation publishes a report on major Internet sites and services called "Who Has Your Back", along with a handy chart summarizing how each company or service deals with government requests for their users' private information...
Teachers’ Resources: The Next Phase for Teaching Privacy
If you're a teacher, you may be looking at this website and thinking, Gee, this is really great material, but how would I use it in the classroom? Well, good news! The Teaching Privacy team has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new set...
How To Invent a Person Online
While we make the argument that you can never trust a person’s identity online, nothing can illustrate that fact more clearly than learning how artist Curtis Wallen created a completely fake identity. Paradoxically, Wallen’s story also illustrates the counterpoint...
Upcoming Workshop: 1984+30: Navigating Privacy Threats and Protections in the Digital Age
In the novel 1984, George Orwell describes a dystopian society in which everything citizens do is monitored by the all-seeing eyes of Big Brother. Thirty years after 1984, we find ourselves surrounded by threats to our privacy. Is there anything to be done? And if so,...
Why You Can’t Assume Anonymity
A (relatively) new tracking technique called canvas fingerprinting allows websites and services to uniquely identify people's devices by including a hidden image on web pages. It can get around most of the common methods and tools people use to keep their activities...
From the How-To Department: Turning Off “Frequent Locations”
An explanation of the iPhone’s “Frequent Locations” feature, and instructions for turning it off if you don’t want it to track and correlate geolocation data this way. However, as this article points out, turning off “Frequent Locations” doesn’t erase the data your...
PC Mag Infographic: 5 Ways You Can Lose a Job on Facebook
With the unemployment rate still at 6.3%, most people will want to avoid facing the job market. Make sure that you know what companies are looking for online and how it can impact your job. Read the PC Mag article here
Resource for High Schoolers: How We Affect Each Other’s Information Footprints
The media literacy organization Commonsense Media produced this lesson plan on the effects of posting information about others (and vice versa): Private Today, Public Tomorrow The situations discussed in the lesson show how important it is to keep up a conversation...
Some Privacy Teaching Resources (Besides This One)
CLIP Privacy Curriculum for Middle Schoolers The Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University created and tested a set of lesson plans and materials for middle schoolers about online privacy, focusing on how privacy impacts reputation and on how to keep...
The Digital Footprint — Metaphor as a Teaching Tool
We recommend this visually engaging video from the media literacy organization Commonsense Media: Digital Footprint The video uses analogies to tangible physical processes and objects like footprints, photocopiers, and jumbotrons to make its point succinctly and...
TEDx Talk: What’s Wrong With Your Pa$$w0rd?
A talk by Lorrie Faith Cranor of Carnegie Mellon University. Check out the video here
Looking to Break Up With Social Media, but Don’t Know How?
We've all been there. Completely fed up with social media, we want to delete your account and just wipe the slate clean. The only problem is...how exactly are you supposed to do that? Account Killer to the rescue! This site has instructions and links to delete...
Peer Education: Creative Privacy PSAs by Teens for Teens
These short videos were created as part of the Community Healthcare Network New York City’s “Somethin’ To Think About” youth program. They do a great job of illustrating different ways your online posts may be seen by people who aren’t the target audience you had in...
Online, Offline, It’s All Real Life
In developing materials around the principle Online Is Real, we had the opportunity to think more about the intimate relationship between online and offline -- which, as we see it, are both aspects of the “real” world. The Internet does work differently than the...
What Is Your Toilet Saying Behind Your Back?
With the internet of things spreading into every facet of our lives, its important to think about what we are giving up. A practical joke perpetrated at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing raises some serious questions about our privacy as more of the...
USA Today: Supreme Court to Hear Case on FB Threats
The Supreme Court agreed recently to consider a classic free speech conundrum for the 21st century: When do threatening comments made on social media sites such as Facebook cross the line into criminal activity? Read the USA Today article here
New York Times: How Not to Pay the Price for Free Wi-Fi
This is an important guide for those of us who need to balance the (often) conflicting desires to make use of a free WiFi service and maintain our privacy. It has four great suggestions we endorse. Read the article here
Internabbed!
Yes, your YouTube videos can be used as evidence against you in court. Police and prosecutors are increasingly often using information from online posts to help build cases, as in this example from New York City: Huffington Post: NYPD Eyeing Rap Lyrics, Music Videos...
Cell Phones Are Now Treated Like Homes: To Search Them, Police Need a Warrant!
Last Week's Supreme Court decision also means: Protect the content of your phone, as revealing its content is equivalent to letting people in your house! Even the law acknowledges that now. Double check the permissions you give to apps. For engineers: Apps should...
Announcing the Teaching Privacy Blog
Using this spiffy new feature, we’ll keep visitors to the site up to date on what’s happening in the world of online privacy, answer some frequently asked questions, and post news about our work. Contact us at info@teachingprivacy.com with questions and suggestions....