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New Addition: Programming for Privacy!
To help CS teachers tie privacy concepts more closely to traditional CS curriculum content — i.e. programming — the Teaching Privacy team created three new programming exercises to add to our Teaching Privacy/TROPE curriculum.
Oakland Police Scandal Uncovered Through Facebook and Instagram
Oakland police officers’ likes, follows, and comments implicated them in a sexual misconduct investigation. Some had strong privacy settings but some didn’t, and investigators seem to have pieced together their roles through the profiles of those that didn’t. Some of...
The Continuum of “Public”
Our advice about online sharing generally has two sides: If you share something online (at all), assume that it could be exposed to a much larger audience than you originally intend. If someone else shares something with you that you want to reshare, ask them first....
It’s Not Just Social Media
Social media may be the first thing most people think of when the subject of online privacy comes up, but online games are another major way your privacy can be compromised. Check out the TouchArcade article here: Confessions of an Anonymous Free to Play Producer
All About Email Encryption
The Free Software Foundation recently released a set of tools and guides on email encryption: Email Self-Defense Site For those who are concerned about protecting their email against any possible eavesdropping (including government surveillance), FSF provides some...
Privacy Lessons: It’s Hard to Hide When You’re on Social Media
This happened a couple months ago: An acquaintance (we’ll call him Egbert) who was estranged from his wife (we’ll call her Namaa) became drunkenly angry about her refusal to communicate with him, and began talking at length about how he was going to kill her. Not just...
Virtual Privacy Lab at San José Public Library
Last year, members of the Teaching Privacy team worked with the San José Public Library to develop content for their Virtual Privacy Lab: Visit the Virtual Privacy Lab Since then, it's been covered in national media, been translated from English into Spanish and...
Thought Medical Records Were Sacred? Think Again!
A recent column in Scientific American explains how trading supposedly "anonymized" data about patients' health history and prescription purchases has become a multibillion-dollar business: How Data Brokers Make Money Off Your Medical Records And an article in Ad Age...
Interactive Lab at Cal Day: What Does the Internet Know About You?
Come join us this Saturday, April 16, at the University of California, Berkeley, at the annual "Cal Day" campus-wide open house! The Teaching Privacy team will be hosting an interactive lab from 10 a.m. - 12 noon in 380 Soda Hall. Come find out what the Internet knows...
Giving Up Your Privacy For a Facebook Quiz
Recently, the "Most Used Words" Facebook quiz has been gaining popularity with over sixteen million users across the globe. However, a majority of these users are unaware that playing the quiz discloses personal data about themselves to a company called Vonvon....
Slipping Through The Backdoor of Your iPhone
Last month, the Obama administration decided that it won't push tech companies to put encryption "backdoors" in their products. This means that the companies are not required to provide law enforcement and government agencies with easy access to decrypted private...
Columbia Researchers Bring Data Tracking Tool to Light
Have you ever wondered how companies are able to show advertisements targeted specifically towards your wants and needs? Researchers from Columbia University developed a tool called Sunlight that aims to improve transparency between users' information, such as emails...
Finding The Perfect Password
You may have already heard that keeping your online accounts safe from hackers require secure and unique passwords for each account. However, how can you think of several passwords containing random letters, numbers, and symbols that are easy to remember? Researchers...
California’s Comprehensive Digital Privacy Law
On October 8, 2015, Governor Jerry Brown signed the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which requires any state law enforcement agency to get a warrant before accessing any electronic information or metadata -- including emails, texts, and location data...
What Facebook Really Knows About You
Do you have your own Facebook account? Are you among the one billion users active on Facebook? According to researchers from The University of Cambridge and Stanford University, a Facebook user’s psychological make-up could be determined based on their activity on the...
Can Information Truly Be “Forgotten”?
With the rapid growth of the Internet in today's digital age, resulting in Big Data that is continuously growing and replicating, it is becoming impossible to completely delete any information that one shares online. It is important to realize that others can discover...
Locating Most Wanted Drug Lord via Twitter
The world's most wanted drug lord, Joaquin Guzman, otherwise known as "El Chapo", has been hiding from the authorities for months after escaping from a maximum-security prison in July. When his son publishes a picture taken in a restaurant on Twitter, he forgets about...
“Digital Kidnapping”?
Brittany Champagne from Utah is a mother who likes to share photos of her children on Facebook, like many other parents today. But what Brittany never thought to find was images of her children on more than ten porn sites. The images seemed to be taken from her...
Wanted Woman Found Through Spotify
This article in The Age covers the case of Brittany Nunn, a mother of two who was fighting for custody of one of her girls. The case seemed to be leaning in favor of the father, so Mrs. Nunn decided to run away with both of her daughters. Drew Webber, an investigator...
Talking Barbie Doll
As a kid, did you ever dream of talking to your favorite toy? Well, this won't be a problem for future generations. With the advancement of technology, toy companies have been able to keep up with children's wishes. This year, multiple toys have been developed that...
U.S. Office of Personnel Management Cyberattack
This past year we have heard of multiple hacks on companies where social security numbers and personal data were stolen from employees. But this new hack is not just your standard cyberattack. These hackers found an indirect way to infiltrate the U.S. Office of...
Are You Ready for the Internet of Things?
It seems like, in today's society, everything revolves around technology. Our devices often keep track of our daily activities -- and our personal preferences. But who gathers this data and what happens to it? Make sure that you know how the Internet of Things is...
Even Our Medical Records Aren’t Safe
In a recent privacy incident at Meritus Hospital, patients' personal and clinical information was accessed by an employee of a third-party vendor for unknown purposes. This story illustrates that, whatever the reasoning behind a decision to share information, it...
Call for Ethical Use of Our Data
Have we finally realized that our data is more valuable than a free service? Symantec recently did a report on consumer behavior that showed, for the first time, that customers cared more about personal privacy than the quality of a service. The article linked below...
Teaching Privacy at CyBEAR
A beta version of the TROPE curriculum under development by the Teaching Privacy team will be put through its paces at this summer’s CyBEAR summer camp, hosted by the TRUST center at University of California--Berkeley. CyBEAR is a four-week program for high school...
CEO of Apple on Privacy and Encryption
Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, gave a speech after receiving the Corporate Leadership award at EPIC's Champions of Freedom event in Washington. (EPIC is the Electronic Privacy Information Center.) Mr. Cook touched upon three important topics relating to privacy, including...
Alternatives for Passwords
Strong passwords are important in preventing data breaches, but the top five passwords in 2014 were strings like "123456" and "password", which are predictable. How can we then prevent cyberattacks from happening? TechNewsWorld covered a presentation titled Kill All...
Operation “We Are Always Listening”
The Russian state television network covered a story of anti-NSA pranksters who have set up recording devices in public places across the city of New York to gather information, and help locate terrorists. The following article touches upon why it is important to...
A Picture Is Worth 20,000 Shares
If we were asked, What age group should we focus on to educate about online privacy? Many of us would immediately think of teenagers as the target group to shed some knowledge upon. But I say, What about adults? Anyone who is on a social-media site should have...
Body Cameras Being Tested
This New York Times article covers the progress of police body cameras. We are now at the point where these cameras are being widely tested by police officers, and the question that seems to be troubling police departments is what to do with the videos recorded. Read...
Police Officers Fired for Sending Racist Private Text Messages
Most people don't think that the text messages they have sent in the past are likely to affect them in the future, but think again. SF Gate recently ran a story on Oakland police officers who are being fired for sending racist private text messages in the years 2011...
Privacy Is Worth Millions
AT&T, an American multinational telecommunications corporation, is being fined $25 million dollars because of customer data breaches where not only names and phone numbers were leaked, but also social security numbers. The breaches occurred when outsiders paid AT&T...
Some Perspectives on the Importance of Privacy
In the last couple of days, some interesting pieces caught our attention that speak to why privacy is important (online or offline). These two works hit the extremes in presentation and style, but make similar points: A serious opinion piece in the New York Times...
Cal Day – What Does the Internet Know About You?
Come join us this Saturday, April 18, at the University of California, Berkeley, where the Teaching Privacy research team will be hosting an interactive lab from 10 a.m. - 12 noon in 380 Soda Hall. Come find out what the Internet knows about you, how it knows it, and...
A Lesson on Privacy, Using Snapchat
The following article is the story of an elementary school teacher who used a screenshot of herself to teach her students about privacy on Snapchat. This elementary school teacher wanted to show her students that the pictures that are sent "privately" through Snapchat...
Teaching Privacy in IEEE MultiMedia Magazine
The January-March issue of IEEE MultiMedia includes a guest column by the Teaching Privacy team, "Teaching Privacy: Multimedia Making a Difference", in the magazine's Media Impact department. And it just so happens that IEEE is making the first issue of the year...
Mobile Apps Are Spying on You
Everyone downloads applications from the app store, but do you know what information you are giving up when you download a new application? Often mobile applications appear to be harmless, but are they? One example of a "harmless" application is the Flashlight app. As...
A Price for Privacy
Have we reached the era where we are no longer in charge of our privacy? One of the most popular telecommunications companies, AT&T, recently released a "supercookie", an undeleteable cookie that tracks the web-browsing activity of its subscribers. They are using this...
California Legislation Aims To Protect K-12 Students’ Online Data
The California Legislature passed a bill in 2014 aimed to ensure student privacy within classrooms that use online resources for learning. The bill tries to limit companies' use of student data to target those students with other sorts of ads and products. This bill,...
BFOIT Teaches Privacy
Each year, high-school students in the Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology (BFOIT) enrichment program participate in internships at ICSI and UC Berkeley. Last August, interns Alexis Conway and Isha Doshi worked with the Teaching Privacy...
Can We Regulate the Internet?
The Federal Communications Commission has been working on new rules to regulate the Internet. For the last year, F.C.C. Chairman Tom Wheeler's goal has been to reach net neutrality, meaning an open Internet. This open Internet order would give the Federal...
Does the New Facebook Privacy Policy Breach German Law?
Facebook's new privacy policy was implemented on January 30, 2015. Concerns have been raised in Europe by Johannes Caspar, the privacy regulator in Hamburg, Germany, that this new Facebook privacy policy might breach the German Data Protection Law. Facebook's new...
President Proposes a $14 Billion Budget to Spend on Cybersecurity
President Obama has proposed a $14 billion budget to spend on cybersecurity in fiscal year 2016. Obama stated in his proposal that "No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets or invade the privacy of American...
The Internet Is Uncontrollable
With the release of the movie The Interview, Sony Pictures suffered substantially from attacks by hackers, including leakage of internal data from the company and threats of violence against movie theaters who choose to play the movie. Despite the efforts of the group...
Smart Power Grids: A Possible Threat to Our Privacy
The next big threat to our privacy may come from the way we consume electricity, through smart grids installed in our homes. Electricity consumption data has become a goldmine, not only for electric companies but also for entrepreneurs deciding to open up stores in...
Can an Algorithm Judge You Better Than Your Spouse?
In a recent study, researchers from the University of Cambridge found that, using a new algorithm, a computer can (allegedly) judge your personality better than your closest relatives. Based on Facebook likes, the algorithm scores better than friends or even parents...
One More Way You Can Leave Footprints: Police Body Cameras
Amid concerns about potential use of excessive force by police (focused most recently on the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner), police departments are being encouraged by the U.S. Department of Justice to equip officers with small body-mounted cameras. Some...
The Internet Never Forgets (No Matter Who You Are)
The CFO of Twitter recently made headlines by (apparently) accidentally tweeting information about an upcoming business deal: Get the New York Times story: Twitter’s C.F.O. Suffers a Social Media Faux Pas This event -- and the CFO's inability to take the information...
What Does That Thumb’s-Up Icon Reveal?
What can a computer figure out about a human? Not just where you are and how you spend your money, but what kind of person you are. One intriguing study last year showed correlations between what people Liked on Facebook and various demographic factors, personal...
What’s in a “Real” Name?
Facebook's "real name" policy has been in the news recently due to a rash of account suspensions and threatened deletions where the account-holders are transgender and using their chosen rather than their legal names -- apparently the result of targeted flagging by...
What Happens When the Government Wants Your Data?
Every year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation publishes a report on major Internet sites and services called "Who Has Your Back", along with a handy chart summarizing how each company or service deals with government requests for their users' private information...
Teachers’ Resources: The Next Phase for Teaching Privacy
If you're a teacher, you may be looking at this website and thinking, Gee, this is really great material, but how would I use it in the classroom? Well, good news! The Teaching Privacy team has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new set...
How To Invent a Person Online
While we make the argument that you can never trust a person’s identity online, nothing can illustrate that fact more clearly than learning how artist Curtis Wallen created a completely fake identity. Paradoxically, Wallen’s story also illustrates the counterpoint...
Upcoming Workshop: 1984+30: Navigating Privacy Threats and Protections in the Digital Age
In the novel 1984, George Orwell describes a dystopian society in which everything citizens do is monitored by the all-seeing eyes of Big Brother. Thirty years after 1984, we find ourselves surrounded by threats to our privacy. Is there anything to be done? And if so,...
Why You Can’t Assume Anonymity
A (relatively) new tracking technique called canvas fingerprinting allows websites and services to uniquely identify people's devices by including a hidden image on web pages. It can get around most of the common methods and tools people use to keep their activities...
From the How-To Department: Turning Off “Frequent Locations”
An explanation of the iPhone’s “Frequent Locations” feature, and instructions for turning it off if you don’t want it to track and correlate geolocation data this way. However, as this article points out, turning off “Frequent Locations” doesn’t erase the data your...
PC Mag Infographic: 5 Ways You Can Lose a Job on Facebook
With the unemployment rate still at 6.3%, most people will want to avoid facing the job market. Make sure that you know what companies are looking for online and how it can impact your job. Read the PC Mag article here
Resource for High Schoolers: How We Affect Each Other’s Information Footprints
The media literacy organization Commonsense Media produced this lesson plan on the effects of posting information about others (and vice versa): Private Today, Public Tomorrow The situations discussed in the lesson show how important it is to keep up a conversation...
Some Privacy Teaching Resources (Besides This One)
CLIP Privacy Curriculum for Middle Schoolers The Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University created and tested a set of lesson plans and materials for middle schoolers about online privacy, focusing on how privacy impacts reputation and on how to keep...
The Digital Footprint — Metaphor as a Teaching Tool
We recommend this visually engaging video from the media literacy organization Commonsense Media: Digital Footprint The video uses analogies to tangible physical processes and objects like footprints, photocopiers, and jumbotrons to make its point succinctly and...
TEDx Talk: What’s Wrong With Your Pa$$w0rd?
A talk by Lorrie Faith Cranor of Carnegie Mellon University. Check out the video here
Looking to Break Up With Social Media, but Don’t Know How?
We've all been there. Completely fed up with social media, we want to delete your account and just wipe the slate clean. The only problem is...how exactly are you supposed to do that? Account Killer to the rescue! This site has instructions and links to delete...
Peer Education: Creative Privacy PSAs by Teens for Teens
These short videos were created as part of the Community Healthcare Network New York City’s “Somethin’ To Think About” youth program. They do a great job of illustrating different ways your online posts may be seen by people who aren’t the target audience you had in...
Online, Offline, It’s All Real Life
In developing materials around the principle Online Is Real, we had the opportunity to think more about the intimate relationship between online and offline -- which, as we see it, are both aspects of the “real” world. The Internet does work differently than the...
What Is Your Toilet Saying Behind Your Back?
With the internet of things spreading into every facet of our lives, its important to think about what we are giving up. A practical joke perpetrated at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing raises some serious questions about our privacy as more of the...
USA Today: Supreme Court to Hear Case on FB Threats
The Supreme Court agreed recently to consider a classic free speech conundrum for the 21st century: When do threatening comments made on social media sites such as Facebook cross the line into criminal activity? Read the USA Today article here
New York Times: How Not to Pay the Price for Free Wi-Fi
This is an important guide for those of us who need to balance the (often) conflicting desires to make use of a free WiFi service and maintain our privacy. It has four great suggestions we endorse. Read the article here
Internabbed!
Yes, your YouTube videos can be used as evidence against you in court. Police and prosecutors are increasingly often using information from online posts to help build cases, as in this example from New York City: Huffington Post: NYPD Eyeing Rap Lyrics, Music Videos...
Cell Phones Are Now Treated Like Homes: To Search Them, Police Need a Warrant!
Last Week's Supreme Court decision also means: Protect the content of your phone, as revealing its content is equivalent to letting people in your house! Even the law acknowledges that now. Double check the permissions you give to apps. For engineers: Apps should...
Announcing the Teaching Privacy Blog
Using this spiffy new feature, we’ll keep visitors to the site up to date on what’s happening in the world of online privacy, answer some frequently asked questions, and post news about our work. Contact us at info@teachingprivacy.com with questions and suggestions....