The Bipartisan Digital Advertising Act Would Break Up Big Trackers
By Bennett Cyphers In May, Senators Mike Lee, Amy Klobuchar, Ted Cruz, and Richard Blumenthal introduced the “Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act.” The…
Bennett Cyphers
How the Federal Government Buys Our Cell Phone Location Data
By Bennett Cyphers Over the past few years, data brokers and federal military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies have formed a vast, secretive partnership to…
Face Recognition Isn’t Just Face Identification and Verification: It’s Also Photo Clustering, Race Analysis, Real-time Tracking, and More
By Bennett Cyphers, Adam Schwartz, and Nathan Sheard Governments and corporations are tracking how we go about our lives with a unique marker that most…
After Cookies, Ad Tech Wants to Use Your Email to Track You Everywhere
By Bennett Cyphers Cookies are dying, and the tracking industry is scrambling to replace them. Google has proposed Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), TURTLEDOVE, and…
Google Is Testing Its Controversial New Ad Targeting Tech in Millions of Browsers. Here’s What We Know.
By Bennett Cyphers Today, Google launched an “origin trial” of Federated Learning of Cohorts (aka FLoC), its experimental new technology for targeting ads. A switch…
Inside the Invasive, Secretive “Bossware” Tracking Workers
By Bennett Cyphers and Karen Gullo COVID-19 has pushed millions of people to work from home, and a flock of companies offering software for tracking…
Facebook Got Caught Phishing For Friends
By Bennett Cyphers and Jason Kelley Once again, Facebook is in the news for bad security practices, dark design patterns, and secretly reappropriating sensitive data…