In the News Archives - Privacy Parent

August 31st, 2023

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Do you use Venmo to pay the babysitter? Do your kids use it to buy snacks or payback their friends? Then check your privacy settings. According to a recent article in the New York Times, Venmo is notorious for gathering your personal information and sharing it far and wide. Your contact lists, past purchases, and lots else, are scooped up and made available for just about anyone on the app to see. The reporter who wrote the piece decided to delete his Venmo app. You might opt not to go that far. But you should, at the very least, dig into the app’s privacy settings and lock them down. The piece explains how.

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August 23rd, 2023

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Tracking Kids through YouTube Ads

In what really should not be a surprise to anyone, it turns out ads on YouTube videos intended for kids may have allowed tech companies to track those kids “across the internet.” That’s not supposed to happen. A recent article in the New York Times reports that lawmakers are asking questions of Google, YouTube’s parent company, and trying to find out whether the tech giant violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. “This behavior by YouTube and Google is estimated to have impacted hundreds of thousands, to potentially millions, of children across the United States,” Sens. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee told the paper.

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June 21st, 2023

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It’s getting really easy to fake a photo

There was a time when creating a phony image required at least a bit of skill. That time has passed. With the help of AI, just about anyone can fake a photo—and a fairly convincing one at that. Photoshop, which takes considerable study to master, is incorporating AI technology that will make it and its many capabilities accessible to just about anyone with a laptop and an imagination. It might be fun! (See the fish in the image above.) But it also presents some serious problems. You don’t have to think too long to conjure ways in which an otherwise benign photo of a friend can be edited to change it into something embarrassing, compromising, or merely insulting. The privacy and security implications are significant. And entirely real. Read more about it from the Washington Post.

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June 14th, 2023

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Our government can track us, really, really easily.

Thanks to your phone, your web-browsing, and the rest of your e-habits, the government knows a whole lot about you and can track your clicks (and steps) without much trouble. Your whereabouts, who you hang out with, your search history—that’s all data that’s compiled and packaged for sale. Can you guess who’s buying it? Law enforcement and intelligence agencies, for starters. And they don’t need a warrant. Most of us have nothing to hide from the government, but, still, a bit creepy. Maybe now you’ll turn off your phone’s location services?

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June 2nd, 2023

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Meta-Hearse for the Metaverse?

Here’s an encouraging story from the New York Times: The Metaverse is kind of flopping. In a new story about Apple finally entering the Meta-scene, the Times reports that, so far, investments in the Metaverse have, largely, been a bust, costing Meta (nee Facebook), Microsoft, and others many billions of dollars. And what do they have to show for it? A whole lot of nothing. For those of us with a preference for the real world, that’s comforting news.

May 24th, 2023

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Nation’s Top Doc: Social Media Isn’t Good for Kids

A “profound risk.” That’s what the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, says social media use can pose to the mental health of children and adolescents. Yes, social media can have benefits—helping people feel isolated make meaningful connections among them—but the downsides, Murthy argues in an advisory, are significant: sleep disruption, repeated exposure to inappropriate content that can “normalize” self-harm, cyberbullying, and on and on. In addition to cautioning parents about their kids’ use of social media, the surgeon general recommends families establish “media plans” with their kids and keep devices away during meal times.

May 10th, 2023

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To Help Students Learn, Schools Ban Phones

Interesting piece in the Washington Post about schools across the country doing their best to prohibit students from staring at their phones while in class. Some schools instruct students to leave their phones in a locker; others require them to store their phones in Yonder bags, which open when students leave campus at the end of the day. Why? Because phones are so distracting, they’re getting in the way of kids’ learning. As students try to catch up from the setbacks of the Covid years, that’s a problem.“We basically said, ‘This has got to stop,’” said Dayton Public Schools Superintendent Elizabeth Lolli. “We’ve got academic issues that are not going to be fixed … if our students continue to sit on their phones.”

March 14th, 2023

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Keep Your Email Address Private

Tech companies and advertisers want your email address. Don’t give it to them. A recent article in the New York Times likens your email address to a “digital breadcrumb” and advises you to keep that crumb to yourself. As one advertising executive said to the Times, “I can take your email address and find data you may not have even realized you’ve given to a brand. … The amount of data that is out there on us as consumers is literally shocking.”

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February 22nd, 2023

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Update your Apple products

Wired and others are reporting on a new bug that can slip past Apple’s security standards and access your messages, photos, and call history. Now would be a good time to update your iPhone, iPad, and any other Apple devices you’ve got. Researchers have identified a bug “that could allow criminal hackers to break out of Apple’s security protections and run their own unauthorized code.” Not good. Update.

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