I think there’s been a lot of talking past each other on privacy lately because there are so many layers to it.

Google or Dropbox keeping your cloud files from showing up on someone else’s drive or a public share is one layer. Keeping your data from leaking in a data breach is another. Protecting messages in transit from your device to their service. Google and Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and now Threads) are good at those.

But then there’s ensuring that Google or Meta doesn’t misuse it themselves, or sell it to someone who will.

And, well, to put it mildly, they’re not so big on that aspect!

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This looks cool: Mozilla has released a translation tool as an add-on for Firefox that can do web page translation locally instead of sending data to the cloud! It’s based on Project Bergamot and implemented in WebAssembly.

IMO translation is one of those things like speech recognition that ideally should have always have been local (for obvious privacy reasons), but the processing and data just wasn’t there yet when Google Translate and similar services launched.

Cnet has a report on how police departments are being inundated with false alarms from Amazon Ring alerts because people have freaked out over the camera footage of innocent activities. In one case someone called to report footage of themselves walking into the door!

I’m reminded of a case that happened nearby just a month ago. In Manhattan Beach (near Los Angeles), police from five cities — and an LA Sheriff’s helicopter — descended on a neighborhood because someone panicked over Ring footage of a food delivery sent to the wrong address. It took them an hour and a half to confirm that there was no crime in progress.

The story basically filled a bingo card:

  • IoT doorbell camera (and of course it was Ring)
  • Gig/app delivery service
  • Upscale neighborhood
  • Paranoid reaction to, you know, people
  • NextDoor posts quoted in article (because of course they are)
  • Massive police over-response
  • SMS alerts sent to neighboring cities

It was absurd. Fortunately no one was hurt or arrested, so it remains an absurdity, but between the waste of resources, the increase in fear, and the risk that something could have gone wrong, it fits right in with these other cautionary tales. As Fight for the Future puts it:

Ubiquitous, privately owned surveillance camera networks are NOT going to make our neighborhoods safer. They just make us all paranoid. Soon we’ll be snitching on our neighbors Red Scare style. Enough

Here’s a fascinating look back at the spam wars by former Gmail spamfighter Mike Hearn.

I was involved for most of the previous decade as (among other things) the email admin for a small ISP. We used a mix of public blacklists, a private blacklist, virus filtering, SpamAssassin with both shared rules and local custom rules, and various other tools all tied together, some at the Sendmail level and the rest through MIMEDefang. It worked tolerably well, though of course it wasn’t perfect. I find it amusing that Gmail declared victory on spam in 2010, the same year that I changed jobs to a position that was more software developer and less sysadmin.

Privacy is a growing concern these days, so he also talks about the impact that widespread end-to-end email encryption would have on spam fighting. If you’re the mail handler, you can’t filter on, say, links found in the message, or characteristics of the writing or formatting, or anything else in the content. You can’t even run statistical analysis on all known spam and non-spam to see which the new message fits better. All you can do is look at where it came from and where it’s going.

Moving the spam filter to the client lets you do content filtering on your own mail, but you can’t take advantage of the larger volume of data that an ISP can, which means your filtering isn’t going to be as effective. And if your main email client is your phone, that’s really going to slow it down — and chew up battery.

Encrypting more of our communication is probably the way to go, but we’ll have to come up with new approaches to some previously-solved problems like this.

It got me thinking: Most of us not only accept that our email providers will look inside our mail to filter spam and viruses, we expect it. That’s weird. The idea of the post office looking inside our letters is so abhorrent that even tracking programs raise concerns. The idea of an actual person reading our email in transit creeps us out. Many people have problems with the idea of automated systems (like Gmail) reading our email for purposes of targeted advertising. But spam filtering? We get upset if it’s not happening!

That says something interesting about our priorities, and about how big an impact unfiltered spam has on our email.

Via ma.tt.

Every time I listen to Vienna Teng’s song, “The Hymn of Acxiom,” it gets creepier. It’s beautiful, it’s haunting…and it’s all about how big data is keeping track of every trace we leave, piecing together a more and more detailed picture of each of us in order to feed us back the perfect, tailored life, and isn’t that what we wanted?

Tracking. Privacy. Social media. Filter bubbles.

And I always think, “I need to post something about this on Facebook…”

And that just creeps me out more.