Stop Watching Me!

Tracking and data mining has gotten way out of hand. We’re not only being tracked online, we’re now being tracked around the real world, too. We’re truly living in a panopticon – and it’s not good for us as individuals or as a democratic society. Today I’ll cover several stories that make it clear that we’ve hit a tipping point. It has to stop. And it’s going to require all of us putting pressure on our representatives to lay down some common sense rules to curb surveillance capitalism. In today’s news: One week left to send in your podcast listener survey; update all your iOS devices ASAP; Apple walks back a controversial OS change that would have allowed some Apple apps to bypass firewalls and VPNs; Microsoft is touting a new Edge browser feature that notifies you when your passwords have been breached; an innocuous-looking police robot is actually paving the way towards chilling mass surveillance; another US intelligence agency has been caught buying the location data of US citizens from data brokers; Apple’s efforts at improving user privacy are ruffling more feathers at Google and Facebook. Further Info New Years Resolution ideas for 2021: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/new-years-resolutions-2021/ Data Privacy Day checklist: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/data-privacy-day-checklist/  Listener survey: https://bit.ly/Firewalls-survey-2021  Patron survey: http://bit.ly/Firewalls-patron-survey-2021