LinkLocker

It isn't always immediately obvious what a tech company might be doing with your data. Because LinkLocker is designed to appeal to exactly the sort of people who might be uncomfortable with dumping their information into a black box and simply hoping for the best, we want to be as open as possible about what happens to the data you put into your LinkLocker account. To that end, we're publishing this series of articles tagged "Things We Don't Do," in which I discuss many of the Web's questionable practices and explain why we do not engage in those practices. In this post, I'd like to talk about the fact that LinkLocker does not hold onto your data in perpetuity. When you ask us to forget something, that's exactly what we do.

A Canadian-owned life insurance company wants to track your health data and base your life insurance premiums on it:

John Hancock, one of the oldest and largest North American life insurers, will stop underwriting traditional life insurance and instead sell only interactive policies that track fitness and health data through wearable devices and smartphones, the company said on Wednesday.

There are lots of caveats to their actual approach given the highly regulated nature of the insurance industry, which may make this sort of situation sound ...

In a brief blog post full of informative screenshots, a Colorado security researcher known as NinjaStyle details how easily he was able to figure out how to pull personal information belonging to attendees of this year's Black Hat security conference. His snooping reveals that personally identifiable information for every attendee of the conference could be gathered in as little as six hours from an API used in collating marketing data via scans of attendee's conference badges. NinjaStyle found that he could pull his ...

The EFF points out that California's Consumer Privacy Act won't become law for 18 months, and that advocates have that amount of time to lobby for improvements to it. I agree completely with their list of suggestions...

It's no secret that we're firm believers in the idea that our users' data is theirs alone, and that it should be kept private. Part of our overall privacy maintenance strategy is simply to avoid doing a lot of the really gross and/or stupid things tech companies typically do in order to show you ads, or to track your behavior for their own "learnings," etc. Because these sorts of things aren't always immediately obvious, we think it's important to spell out explicitly what it is we aren't doing. To that end, I'll be publishing a series of posts tagged "Things We Don't Do." For this first installment, I'd like to talk about our logging policies. Most services store a reference to everything you do, even when they don't have a good reason to do so. We store as little info about you as possible.