Privacy Digest 23/23
Facebook Watches Teens Online As They Prep for College
A recent investigation by The Markup revealed that Facebook, via the Meta Pixel tracking tool, monitors the online activities of teenagers as they prepare for college. This tracking occurs on various educational and related websites, often essential for college applications and school activities. The Meta Pixel captures data on sites like the ACT, Common App, Prezi, and ArbiterSports tracking interactions and gathering information such as hashed email addresses and IP addresses. Concerningly, this surveillance also extends to websites aimed at children under 13, despite regulations like COPPA.
themarkup.org
This Is Why Google Paid Billions for Apple to Change a Single Setting
Zeynep Tufekci highlights privacy concerns with technology companies like Facebook and Amazon, noting how they shift the responsibility of privacy to users through default settings. She cites instances where personal data was shared without explicit consent and stresses the difficulty for even tech-savvy individuals to manage privacy settings. Tufekci argues for regulatory changes, pointing out Apple's significant impact on the industry by altering default settings for tracking. She also deep dives into how Google paid Apple $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine on various Apple platforms, amounting to more than a third of Google's parent company Alphabet's entire 2021 profits.
nytimes.com
The Face Is the Final Frontier of Privacy
When you have your face scanned at the airport, you're making a choice to give up privacy that most aren't even aware of.
time.com
Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records
The WIRED analysis of leaked police documents verifies that a secretive government program is allowing federal, state, and local law enforcement to access phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.
wired.com