Category: dsdefender

If you’re a Google Cloud customer, like we are, you’ve received updated information on the Google Subprocessors list… So what might that be? And what might a Google Subprocessor do? Well, according to Google, third-party subprocessors:

“perform limited activities in connection with the Google Cloud Platform Services. The table shows what activity each entity performs and indicates if an entity is only relevant to a specific Service or Region. More information about each activity is provided directly below. This explains the limited processing of Customer Data the entity is authorized to perform.“

We should be giving them credit for this disclosure, but the size of the list gave me pause. We would have liked to copy them here for your reading pleasure, but the list is simply too long. You should go to this link, it’ll give you a small idea of who and where the organisations that handle your Google data reside.

That’s only the start… Then there’s Google Group Subprocessors, and of course the Subprocessors for Cloud Identity Services.

Happy Reading.

Bipartisan rancour. It’s almost pleasant to watch. Whether it’s a Democrat complaining about mis-information or a Republican throwing hypocritical barbs about censorship, Washington is the circus to see. Big Tech has been dancing and the politicians have been playing ring master. My favourite bits though, are inside the tent of mirrors.

Epic’s battle, Spotify suing in Europe, and Match’s $500 Million per year pay to play Apple tax, Tile getting boxed out while a new AirTag was released just this week. (Economist’s are going to write books about Apple’s controlled ecosystem, hopefully as a warning.) Each dancing pony is better than the last! And the ringmaster’s are smiling while nodding their heads. One of these days this App Store madness is going to come crashing down.

Is there any technical reason you can’t sell apps on a platform other than Apple’s? Of course not…

No later than this morning, we had an app rejected because a link on our app, which opens a browser to our site, displays a Windows and Android download link. Seriously? No! They call it “meta data” and this “meta data” was against their store policy. A link to our web site… Dance pony, dance!

For the App Store uninitiated it’s hard to fathom just how much control Apple has over our products, how much revenue they generate from our hard work, and how their platform can determine the success or failure of ‘our’ products.

If you like a good circus and want to, just for a second, eliminate that sick feeling that comes when you have no other option, keep an eye on this spectacle.

Here’s another place to start.

Here’s a hard truth for parents: Big Tech knows more about your kids than you do. 

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter and so many more are vacuuming up countless bits of digital information about users. The details, when aggregated, paint a portrait of each person online that ordinary humans are unable to put together themselves.

These organizations may not know more about your kids’ personality than you do. But if  your children are online, the people behind the websites they visit know an astonishing amount about their interests, taste, relationships and the things they desire and want to buy.

That’s true if your children have their own smartphone, tablet or laptop computer, but it even applies to information about your kids that you put online yourself. Across platforms and with no regard to the age of the users, Big Tech is tracking you.

What Big Tech Knows and How

As the Associated Press put it, “The companies gather vast data on what users read and like and leverage it to help advertisers target their messages to the individuals they want to reach.” For context, Facebook earned 99% of its money from ads in the previous year and Google’s corporate parent Alphabet saw 85% of revenue from ads, per the AP. 

Meanwhile, Amazon records the details of not only each product you purchase, but also about what items you browsed for and compared before making a decision. If your kids are shopping online, Amazon has all that information about them, too. Though you and your family bear the cost, it’s a windfall for Amazon. AP noted that Amazon uses the user data it collects to boost the value of its ads. Ad sales revenue surpassed $10 billion in 2018 representing more than twice the earnings from the previous year (the latest statistics available). There is a huge financial incentive for Big Tech to know more about your kids than you.

In addition to boosting advertising and marketing for goods and services, the information collected by Big Tech about you and your family can include a whole range of other sensitive details. Think political affiliation, sexual preference and detailed geographical updates about where you live, work and vacation.

No Age Restrictions on Tracking

Big Tech companies track your whereabouts based on details from your smartphone as you are out and about. They know how old you are and where you spend time (shopping malls, churches, bars, and so on) to learn about demographics in your area and to target you even more precisely. If your kids have smartphones, Big Tech is tracking them in the same way. There are no age restrictions when it comes to tracking.

The information is used to predict as well as influence what you might be most interested in buying or which candidate you seem to favor for elected office. All the while, you’re presented with advertisements and “news” is fed to you in a curated, tailor-made experience.

Remember that it’s not just kids’ own online activity that Big Tech is tracking. These companies are also gathering information about the products that parents just like you are buying for their kids. They record what programs parents enroll their children in, what movies they watch and the photos that parents post online. All of this data is valuable to advertisers, which is why they take such pains to collect it on a massive scale.

What You Can Do

What are concerned parents to do under these circumstances? Part of your New Year’s resolutions could be to sit down and have a family discussion about the negative consequences that come from revealing so much information about ourselves.

The goal should be to emphasize security online and to protect your privacy from those who have no business snooping around your personal information. 

Take steps to limit companies tracking  you. Delete cookies when closing a web browser. Restricting how many personal details are posted online. Ask yourself if it’s really worth it to reveal your information to a new company by signing in using your Facebook credentials.

Maybe you’ll be less inclined to give up information to Big Brother when you consider just how much technology companies stand to benefit while you have so much to lose.

Reprinted with permission from Privacy Parent.

If the New York Times starts to get it, so do a lot of other people. This article is one of the best explanations of why you need a private browser, and why you need to stop drinking the Chrome, Safari, Edge Kool aid. If You Care About Privacy, It’s Time to Try a New Web Browser. Our only criticism would be that they’ve left out the best private browser on the market, Datacappy. But according to Brian X. Chen, we’ve reached an inflection point in digital privacy. Let’s hope he’s right!

All the press and the REpress about this $5Billion lawsuit against Google makes me realise how far Google has gone down the rabbit hole. Google’s legal team are juggling a few of these Billion dollar suits. Around the world. A normal days work… Guess where your advertising dollars are going.

What makes me really curious though is, who chose the name? Seriously. That guy/girl/other hit a home run. If you call your product incognito, does it mean you’re private? The judges are asking the same question but sit safely on the side of, ‘you didn’t clearly disclose…’. And why would they? And Google of course says, ‘yes, we did, look!’

Besides the hefty number being bantered around, the only real interest in this little spat, is that maybe now, a few more users will become aware that ‘incognito’, is not really what they think it is.

There has been a lot of concern about an odd virus infecting Apple’s newest M1 devices. Under normal conditions viruses infect Apple products less than Windows. Red Canary who discovered Silver Sparrow, (why would you name a virus after a close relative of your company?) is still trying to understand it’s purpose. After having infected 30,000 plus M1 chips, what it does is still a mystery. This article from the BBC suggests Silver Sparrow might just be a proof of concept in order to show that it’s not really that difficult to move dangerous code onto a Mac. That seems reasonable…

The Council of the European Union, the European Commission and the European Parliament designed the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in an effort to protect people’s personal data and privacy when on a website. Through the GDPR, websites are now required to disclose to users that cookies will be used to track their digital footprint and allow users to opt out. Most users find it cumbersome to complete the process and disregard the option. There is also a regulation that grants users the right to be forgotten which allows them to contact companies that collect, analyze and sell their data and request that they be deleted from their databases.  

GDPR laws were not designed in the interest of the user but rather in the interest of the Big Tech giants: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. These key content providers and data collectors, along with many others, profit on the acquisition of user data. Google’s business model masters the art of data collection with Facebook, Amazon and Apple following in their footsteps. Microsoft, while a slightly smaller player in this arena, should not be overlooked for their influence in helping craft the GDPR.

Along with Big Tech, politicians have used the GDPR as a false cover to pretend they are concerned with digital privacy. If politicians really wanted to protect users’ digital data from Big Tech, then the laws would have been differently crafted. The right to be forgotten has confusing loopholes and is nearly impossible for users to implement. In order to be forgotten, a user must make a request to every individual company that collects data and ask to be removed. It’s a daunting task because there are so many companies who collect, analyze and sell data and it’s almost impossible to track them all down. Even if you could contact all these companies, they are constantly generating new partners with whom they transfer your data and the endless cycle continues. This is insanity.  If the laws were crafted with users’ privacy as the primary concern, they wouldn’t be called ‘the right to be forgotten’ but rather ‘the right to be remembered’.  

Let’s pretend the GDPR laws allowed users the same, simple ability to opt out of being tracked as it currently does now to opt in with a single click. If this were the case, websites would never get any user information! Big Tech companies are not affected by GDPR regulations because people are lazy, don’t care or simply do not understand what’s at stake.  If there was a right to be remembered then users would have a real choice, not an obscure, confusing set of steps deeply entrenched within a privacy policy or user agreement. The problem is that users are “informed” but not in ways they can ever access. Who reads a privacy policy or user agreement? It’s easy to slip in consent to collect data in these online documents. It would be much more difficult if every third party host who wanted to place a tracking cookie on your device had to ask for your consent every time. No one would take the time to write companies to allow themselves to be tracked and people would have a real chance at protecting their digital information. These laws need to be re-thought and re-crafted to truly protect digital information.