Category: Privacy & Security

A rugged male Metro Toronto police officer stares down a female protester outside the Toronto G-20 meetings in 2010. She…  Read More

“Security” is a Latin word which means “without care,” from the Latin prefix “Se” (meaning “without”) and “curity” meaning “care.”…  Read More

A secure crib and a baby monitor are on the “must-have” safety checklist for many new parents. But when you…  Read More

George Orwell once observed that “the ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend…  Read More

Anecdotally, most people know that the video technology they use in everyday life is changing at an alarmingly fast pace….  Read More

  Civil commitment (i.e., civil involuntary hospitalization and treatment) is sometimes necessary to treat some psychiatric patients, especially those believed…  Read More

In June 2013, Edward Snowden burst onto the world media scene. He had worked as a contractor for the U.S….  Read More

VIZIO is reportedly paying fines for using TVs to track user’s viewing patterns in significant detail as well as associating…  Read More

“Alexa, tell me, in your own words, what happened on the night in question.” Actually the request is more like,…  Read More

Guest Blog entry by Cassie Phillips With the recent, record-breaking distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks carried out with hijacked Internet-of-Things…  Read More

The powers of big data, AI/analytics, and subtle data collection are now converging to a future only hinted at in Orwell’s 1984.

With Siri and Alexa, you are being asked to “bug your house” with a device that listens to every noise in the house.

Should children have toys that can combine speech recognition with a Wi-Fi connection to capture and respond to them, and that potentially are able to record their conversations as well as feed them “messages”?  Welcome to the world of Hello Barbie.

The insurance company’s privacy policy does not allow them to collect the data that their web page claims this device will collect — so clearly privacy is an afterthought.

A recent CBS Sixty Minutes program interviewed folks at U.S. DARPA, including a demonstration of how a recent hacking of…  Read More

The intention of this blog-segment is to bring up a current problem caused by technology and discuss not only its…  Read More

Like everyone, I listened to the news about the Boston Marathon bombings on Monday afternoon with horror. I’m not from…  Read More

Oh Google, I love a lot of your products and services, but this was pretty stupid. If you hadn’t heard…  Read More

Homebase location * Ann Arbor, Michigan USA Email philip@faerberhall.com SSIT Roles (and years) * 2013-15 DL 2013-17 BoG Member 2015…  Read More

SSIT Roles: Vice President, 2015; Blog master 2014-present IEEE Roles: SSIT Board (elected or appointed), IEEE Director, Member IEEE Technical…  Read More