Bennett Cyphers, EFF

Bennett Cyphers

EFF

San Francisco, CA, United States

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Recent:
  • Unknown
Past:
  • EFF

Past articles by Bennett:

EFF

How to Disable Ad ID Tracking on iOS and Android, and Why You Should Do It Now

The ad identifier - aka “IDFA” on iOS, or “AAID” on Android - is the key that enables most third-party tracking on mobile devices. Disabling it will make it substantially harder for advertisers and data brokers to track and profile you, and will limit the amount of your personal information up for... → Read More

EFF

Ban Online Behavioral Advertising

Tech companies earn staggering profits by targeting ads to us based on our online behavior. This incentivizes all online actors to collect as much of our behavioral information as possible, and then sell it to ad tech companies and the data brokers that service them. This pervasive online... → Read More

EFF

Google’s Manifest V3 still hurts privacy, security, and innovation

It's been over two years since our initial response to Google's Manifest V3 proposal. Manifest V3 is the latest set of changes to the Chrome browser’s rules for browser extensions. Each extensions manifest version update introduces backwards-incompatible changes to ostensibly move the platform... → Read More

EFF

After Facebook Leaks, Here Is What Should Come Next

Every year or so, a new Facebook scandal emerges. These blowups follow a fairly standard pattern, at least in the U.S. First, new information is revealed that the company misled users about an element of the platform—data sharing and data privacy, extremist content, ad revenue, responses to abuse—... → Read More

EFF

Face Recognition Technology: Commonly Used Terms

As face recognition technology evolves at a dizzying speed, new uses and terminologies seem to develop daily. On this page, we attempt to define and disambiguate some of the most commonly used terms. For more information on government use of face recognition and how to end it in your community,... → Read More

EFF

Illinois Bought Invasive Phone Location Data From Banned Broker Safegraph

The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) purchased access to precise geolocation data about over 40% of the state’s population from Safegraph, the controversial data broker recently banned from Google’s app store. In an agreement signed in January 2019, IDOT paid $49,500 for access to two years’ worth of raw location data. The dataset consisted of over 50 million → Read More

EFF

Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency is Upending Mobile Phone Tracking

Apple’s long-awaited privacy update for iOS is out, and it’s a solid step in the right direction. With the launch of iOS 14.5, hundreds of millions of iPhone users will now interact with Apple’s new AppTrackingTransparency feature. Allowing users to choose what third-party tracking they will or will not tolerate, and forcing apps to request those permissions, gives users more → Read More

EFF

App Stores Have Kicked Out Some Location Data Brokers. Good, Now Kick Them All Out.

Last fall, reports revealed the location data broker X-Mode’s ties to several U.S. defense contractors. Shortly after, both Apple and Google banned the X-Mode SDK from their app stores, essentially shutting off X-Mode’s pipeline of location data. In February, Google kicked another location data... → Read More

EFF

Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea

The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create its replacement. No one should mourn the death of the cookie as we know it. For more than two decades, the third-party cookie has been the lynchpin in a shadowy, seedy, multi-billion dollar advertising-surveillance industry on the Web... → Read More

EFF

Inside the Invasive, Secretive “Bossware” Tracking Workers

COVID-19 has pushed millions of people to work from home, and a flock of companies offering software for tracking workers has swooped in to pitch their products to employers across the country.The services often sound relatively innocuous. Some vendors bill their tools as “automatic time tracking”... → Read More

EFF

Apple and Google’s COVID-19 Exposure Notification API: Questions and Answers

Apple and Google are undertaking an unprecedented team effort to build a system for Androids and iPhones to interoperate in the name of technology-assisted COVID-19 contact tracing.The companies’ plan is part of a torrent of proposals to use Bluetooth signal strength to enhance manual contact... → Read More

EFF

Google Says It Doesn’t 'Sell' Your Data. Here’s How the Company Shares, Monetizes, and Exploits It.

"Google will never sell any personal information to third parties; and you get to decide how your information is used." - Sundar Pichai Sound familiar? Although big tech companies like Google keep the lights on by harvesting and monetizing your personal data, they can be quick to mince words and deny the strawman scenario of exchanging hard drives full of your data for a → Read More

EFF

Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Deep Dive Into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance

It's time to shed light on the technical methods and business practices behind third-party tracking. For journalists, policy makers, and concerned consumers, this paper will demystify the fundamentals of third-party tracking, explain the scope of the problem, and suggest ways for users and legislation to fight back against the status quo. → Read More

EFF

Why Fiber is Vastly Superior to Cable and 5G

The United States, its states, and its local governments are in dire need of universal fiber plans. Major telecom carriers such as AT&T and Verizon have discontinued their fiber-to-the-home efforts, leaving most people facing expensive cable monopolies for the future. While much of the Internet... → Read More

EFF

Don't Play in Google's Privacy Sandbox

Last week, Google announced a plan to “build a more private web.” The announcement post was, frankly, a mess. The company that tracks user behavior on over ⅔ of the web said that “Privacy is paramount to us, in everything we do.” Google not only doubled down on its commitment to targeted... → Read More

EFF

Google’s Plans for Chrome Extensions Won’t Really Help Security

Note: Sam Jadali, the author of the DataSpii report referenced in this blog post, is an EFF Coders’ Rights client. However, the information about DataSpii in this post is based entirely on public reports.Last week we learned about DataSpii, a report by independent researcher Sam Jadali about the “... → Read More

EFF

Sharpening Our Claws: Teaching Privacy Badger to Fight More Third-Party Trackers

The latest release of Privacy Badger gives it the power to detect and block a new class of evasive, pervasive third-party trackers, including Google Analytics. Most blocking tools, like uBlock Origin, Ghostery, and Firefox’s native blocking mode (using Disconect’s block lists), use human-curated... → Read More

EFF

Fines Aren’t Enough: Here’s How the FTC Can Make Facebook Better

The Federal Trade Commission is likely to announce that Facebook’s many violations of users’ privacy in recent years also violated its consent decree with the commission. In its financial filings, Facebook has indicated that it expects to be fined between $3 and $5 billion by the FTC. But punitive... → Read More

EFF

Facebook Got Caught Phishing For Friends

Once again, Facebook is in the news for bad security practices, dark design patterns, and secretly reappropriating sensitive data meant for “authentication” to its own ends. Incredibly, this time, the company managed to accomplish all three in one fell swoop.What happened?Last weekend, news broke... → Read More

EFF

Net Neutrality’s Day in Court

Public Interest Advocates, Local Governments, and Others Defend the Open Internet OrderThe Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard the case of Mozilla v. FCC today to determine whether the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is allowed to repeal its net neutrality rules... → Read More