People want to control what information they share, but can’t.
Digital systems share our personal preferences over the Internet with… we don’t really know. US Research shows online privacy is “very important” to people, even when they lack skills to protect themselves. Perceptions vary elsewhere, but if we can leverage public opinion to improve privacy rights, there’s hope.
Close to a third of the world’s population still have no data protection rights.
Around half of all countries, including most of Asia, Africa and the United States have no comprehensive laws to define privacy rights or rules for fair handling of personal data. The European Union has strong protections, and national laws in many other countries are forthcoming.
Many more websites now encrypt Web traffic with HTTPS.
The padlock in your browser’s address bar is seeing more action as nearly 50% of webpages now offer secure connections (compared with around 40% at the start of 2016). HTTPS is no longer limited to just banking and shopping. All Web browsing should be encrypted.
Breaches affected hundreds of millions of accounts in 2013-2016.
When data is stolen, sometimes no one knows until logins, passwords and other personal information show up for sale online. Breaches are getting bigger and more frequent. Do we have a security epidemic on our hands? In December 2016, Yahoo reported the biggest breach in history: 1 billion accounts.
Breaches in the health and medical sector have skyrocketed in the past 3 years.
If the US numbers are anything to go by, we can see the risk of new sectors adopting more technology without always having the necessary security experience or budgets. There are great opportunities for better healthcare management thanks to the Internet, but also huge personal risks on a global scale. Who weighs the pros and cons?
No other way to improve privacy on the web then to limit your personal data exposure. Just because you trust a Facebook or Google does not mean that information stays with those entities exclusively. Personal information stored on servers you have no ideal where they are, or how well they are protected is leaving yourself open to losing your information. Its better to assume the more you open your information to the web to more risk you take.
Qualifying Whatsapp’s activity as “healthy for the internet” seems quite crazy to me.
Therefore it would be beneficial if Mozilla would remove the tracking abilities from its browser. No unique id is required for surfing the web. So why does Firefox implement a unique id?
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/private-browsing/
For more than a decade I’ve been imagining that these things happen. I also suspect that some organizations go out to play at least with two shirts. They have one team in front, and the other one underneath.
But the simple users we can deal with these things? I think these are the conditions of possibility that the Internet has for us. Besides, I am not willing to become paranoid. It would be a waste of useless energy. In any case we should think about returning to the messenger pigeons
Then why does Mozilla have telemetry data enabled as default (Options->Data sources-> Share telemetry)? Why does is private browsing NOT enabled as default? Why does one have to go through Options very carefully to ensure a more private browsing experience?
Seems to me, Mozilla is a bit of an offender.
What they are talking about is tracking and privacy. The telemetry is completely anonymous and sent over a secure line; Mozilla does not fingerprint you using the data you send. It’s used for statistics and crash reports.
Thank you for good report
Also very subtle Mozilla having the eye of Ra/Horas/All seeing eye/eye of providence on the front of your page 🙂 Not like the “about:mozilla/palemoon/iceweasel” ect pages didn’t give away anything.
Nothing we can do mozilla is controlled too and guess who created TOR? That’s right the government. No such thing as privacy. Look at the RFID chip implants we’re fucked.. I would say switch to a GNU/Linux distro but even Richard Stallman was exposed of being an occult leader of sorts just look up gnu isn’t gng to get my point. :/
For all those who are lazy to do it here’s the link: http://gng.z505.com/
Your conclusion amounts to victim blaming: “Above all, we should be more critical about what information we share voluntarily.” If this advice is to be taken seriously, then let’s illustrate it with an example: You walk into a grocery store. The grocery store performs a quick facial scan to ascertain your mood to gauge how likely you are to cause trouble. You’re sharing this information with the facial recognition system voluntarily. You should be more critical of sharing this information and therefore try not to show emotion. Keep a stoic expression at all times, since who knows maybe that CCTV… Read more »
Good points. I would argue that Mozilla chooses the target of least resistance. Much harder to convince profit-centric private corporations to do the right thing than non-paying essentially free individuals. I agree with all your points btw. The issue remains massive data collection and very little transparency or accountability. Furthermore- in your scenario- you enter a store. It is private property. They would argue (IMHO sophistical) that your choice to enter their premises equates to you signing off on their terms and conditions of entry (data collection, data sharing, surveillance behaviour prediction etc)- yet they never provide you with a… Read more »
Encryption is critical for individual as well for all business World wide- privite encryption firms have to be funded byeveryone pay more for the best to protect and long prison terms for cyber criminals.
segurança seria aquilo que buscamos todos os dias pra nós e mais ainda pra nossa família ,e nossa internet caminhamos pra ser livre ,e viver com aquilo que gostamos e desejamos ,pós ainda falta muito pra se chegar a este ponto ,que ira dar mais estabilidade ,de se navegar ,ser livre ir e vir ,sem ser obrigado a seguir regras e ordem ditadas pelo site forte poderoso ,devido a isto gosto muito do nosso Mozilla ,livre sem propagandas e rápido ,muito obrigado
Security by obscurity works best when there’s also a distance or proximity element involved. For example, I don’t need to put bars on my windows, because there aren’t many criminals on my street, most of them are far away and can’t easily get to every house… but if every worst criminal in the entire world had immediate and full access to my street at any time, and there was little to no cost for them to all try to break into every house worldwide as hard as they could, then I’d need a lot more than mere bars on the… Read more »
“meat space” WTF- don’t make up tech jargon words, it’s obfuscating, stupid and we have plenty of perfectly serviceable well-used English words already widely understood. IF you cannot speak good English, don’t murder it.
As a mathematician, I understand that my best protection is built into the world. Obscurity, vast sums of data, huge amounts of electrons spinning around the globe at the speed of light. The chances of getting affected by these problems is astonishingly small in any given location. I work for the United States Navy, I tell people every day, security is an individual responsibility, which operates on the collective level. If you are secure, the person next to you is probably also secure. You can spend a lot of time and energy trying to avoid possible (but unlikely) events from… Read more »
Well spoken, man. I still worry some though.
Yes. people know what to do when they smell smoke. They also know what to do when food smells, tastes bad or gives them aches. But they don’t know what to do when their browser warns them about TLS. They don’t know when their OS warns them how many privileges an app has. They don’t know how not to give up control of their devices to someone else (and how to *know* whom are they giving it). They don’t know how to manage all the contacts without submitting their social networks hostage to completely foreign companies. They don’t know how… Read more »
Sophistic argument by the guilty party. You sound much like mathematician Nash whose game theory was heavily biased by his own personal schizophrenia which he believed fervently was real and not a figment of a damaged imagination. Ergo your premises are flawed and your arguments illogical and irrational. Premise one- lots of information alias needle in haystack argument. False analogy- you claim the vast sea of data renders it very difficult to find he one plankton. This is known to be false, considering the data collection auto-tags everything with metadata- at least date, time and origin. This is later filtered… Read more »