LinkLocker

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 ...

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 quite entertaining to watch Venmo try to explain away the default behavior of their app, which broadcasts users' transaction info publicly. The unnamed PayPal spokesbot cited in that story claims the service was "designed for sharing experiences," which is a delightful wad of claptrap devised in order to spin the fact that they must want to publish this data about your finances in an attempt to attract new users.

Everything in Silicon Valley may "need" to be a disgusting "growth hack" in order ...

Law firms specializing in personal injury cases are targeting ads at people sitting in emergency rooms, and there's probably very little you can do about it. If you want to keep information about your health private, use an ad blocker, and avoid ad-funded apps & services.

In fact, please just go ahead and do those things anyway. Someday you'll be very glad you did.

The news about the new Signal Foundation is encouraging, provided that new stakeholders like Acton (and presumably others) don't get it in their heads to screw things up in the usual Silicon Valley way of screwing good things up. Moxie Marlinspike remains at the helm, and I trust him to keep Signal from becoming another ad-driven sinkhole of VC grossness. Also, the fact that this new entity is a non-profit ought to keep the incentives of all involved relatively pure.

It will be exciting ...