If you’re an avid user of Facebook, it likely knows you better than you know yourself. It has access to your data, your friend’s list, your memories, your messages, and a record of everything you’ve ever clicked on, commented on or scrolled past on the platform throughout your history on it.

Not content with the data pool it has built (read: stolen from unwitting users), Facebook now wants to see what you see by living in front of your eyes.

It’s hard not to be cynical about the launch of Ray-Ban Stories, the $299 Smart Glass collaboration between Ray-Bans and…

Apple’s promise of adding driver’s licenses and state IDs to Apple Wallet is coming to fruition and bringing with it a wallet-full of questions.

As soon as I posted the news, people expressed concerns about holding up their phone or, worse, handing it over so an official can ogle your license on the screen.

That’s not how this works. Let’s look at how it does.

Getting the license on your device

For those living in Arizona and Georgia (and soon Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah), the process of adding your driver’s license to your phone’s wallet starts with your existing, physical license.

As you…

In “The New Antitrust/Data Privacy Law Interface,” Temple Law’s Erika M Douglas presents a fascinating look at the tensions between privacy and competition.

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-new-antitrustdata-privacy-law-interface

It’s only fitting that Douglas published her paper in the Yale Law Journal, as that’s the same journal that kickstarted the modern antitrust revolution when it published Lina Khan’s “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” while she was a law student.

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

Douglas rightly points out that there are many ways in which competition and privacy are in tension with one another (and sometimes, they’re in out-and-out conflict).

Take the fight over Google’s war on third-party cookie-tracking. Google is…

I work in cryptography. I’ve published a paper on the topic and hold patents as well. To undersell a bit: I care a great deal about privacy and security. And there’s very rarely any daylight between the opinions I hold and the position of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Yet, everyone I follow and admire in the privacy sphere is angry at Apple right now for their attempt to combat child sexual abuse photos in the Apple ecosystem. And I’m not.

Here are the significant points that the EFF and others are making:

1. It’s a slippery slope: once you build the…

What a week it’s been for Apple. It’s trying to do something important: protect children from abuse. But in doing so, revealing its plans well in advance of launching the tools and technology, the normally unflappable Cupertino tech giant opened a Pandora’s Box of questions and concerns.

Since then, it’s been on an information-sharing offensive, speaking to media about the intention and specific tech underpinnings of its CSAM Detection technology, and even having high-level executives sit down with media for on-the-record one-on-ones to eradicate misinformation and calm everyone down.

It may or may not have worked.

For me, it’s been…

Apple, the company that famously fought the FBI on backdoor access to anyone’s encrypted iPhone, may be working on a plan to automatically scan photos in the cloud and on your phone for child abuse images.

This, on the face of it, sounds like a solid plan: automated technology that can help authorities get ahead of those who might seek to or be actively harming children. That’s almost fist-pumping stuff.

However, the technology, which reportedly will use artificial intelligence (AI) trained on a database of 200,000 images from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, does raise some interesting…

Tech monopoly apologists insist that there’s something exceptional about tech that makes it so concentrated: “network effects” (when a product gets better because more people use it, like a social media service).

They’re wrong.

Tech is concentrated because the Big Tech companies buy up or crush their nascent competitors — think of Facebook’s predatory acquisition of Instagram, which Zuckerberg admitted (in writing!) was driven by a desire to recapture the users who were leaving FB in droves.

Google’s scale is driven by acquisitions — Search and Gmail are Google’s only successful in-house products. …

Apple’s glitzy developer conference this June, WWDC, gave us our annual peek at the latest and greatest software the company is bringing to our devices, from iOS 15 to major updates to macOS, iPadOS, and more.

This year, as with other years, privacy improvements across Apple’s operating systems were front-and-center. Building on its anti-tracking pop-up boxes introduced last year that targeted cross-app tracking, iOS will now allow users to block email senders from tracking whether or not people are opening their emails.

Open tracking is one of the few ways people who send email are able to understand how well…