A huge but little-known industry has cropped up around monetizing people’s movements

China’s surveillance machine has grown with the aid of Chinese and international technology companies. But few have faced repercussions

A University Senate subcommittee recommended Miami University not renew its contract with Proctorio for next year due to concerns voiced by students and faculty.

An accessible introduction to the field of Surveillance Studies.

A key backer of a 2018 Oakland law says the city is not following the rules.

A recent report from the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), reveals that parents and teachers have learned to accept surveillance in schools.

At Google, a seemingly innocuous action can earn an employee the attention of the company’s corporate security department. For example, when Google wants to find out who has been accessing or leaking sensitive corporate information, the company often homes in on employees who are thinking about ...

The Intelligence Community has deployed ad-blocking technology, according to a letter sent by Congress and shared with Motherboard.

tl;dr: it's crap.

We dig into geofence / keyword search warrants, where police request broad data near the scene of a crime - or not near a crime scene at all.

The past few years have seen widespread adoption of software that monitors students in K-12 schools across the country. These tools provide teachers and schools with the ability to filter web content, monitor students’ search engine queries and browsing history, view students’ email, messaging, and social media content, view the contents of their screens in […]

Many school districts across the nation expanded efforts to provide devices like laptops and tablets to students during the global pandemic in an effort to close the homework gap and address inequities in technology access. Part of this shift included the introduction of student activity monitoring software and other digital tools aimed in part at […]

Chris Gilliard grew up with racist policing in Detroit. He sees a new form of oppression in the tech we use every day.

How to Write with Your Digital Self

Patron privacy, as articulated in the American Library Association (ALA) Code of Ethics, is a longstanding concern for librarians. In online environments, the possibility of tracking by third parties, usage of HTTPS/TLS to provide secure connections, and easy disclosure of a site’s privacy policies all have implications for user privacy. This paper presents new empirical evidence about these issues and discusses their ethical implications. Data about the incidence of third-party tracking, usage of HTTPS by default, and easy discoverability of a privacy policy or terms of service (TOS) were collected for public libraries across Canada and the United States. The sample consisted of 178 public libraries; members of the Canadian Urban Libraries Council and Urban Libraries Council. Several common commercial databases (e.g. OverDrive) were also examined using the same criteria. Results show that only 12% of libraries were devoid of third-party tracking, with Google Analytics being the most common third-party tracker. While libraries may support HTTPS under certain circumstances, it was found that a majority of libraries serve neither their websites nor their online catalogs (OPACs) HTTPS by default. Regarding disclosure of possible tracking, it was found that 58% of libraries did not link to a TOS or privacy policy from their homepage. Together with previous research on the usage of privacy-enhancing tools in public libraries, these results suggest that public libraries are accessories to third-party tracking on a large scale. Implications of this fact in light of library professional ethics are discussed.

A week after the pandemic forced Minneapolis students to attend classes online, the city school district’s top security chief got an urgent email, its subject line in all caps, alerting him to potential trouble. Just 12 seconds later, he got a second ping. And two minutes after that, a third. In each instance, the emails […]

Many parents seem happy to use their child’s first smartphone as a way to check their whereabouts. There are reasons to reconsider that.

Data is fed into Palantir and helps enable "large-scale monitoring."