The Citizen Lab reports on targeted ads as a vector to install spyware on devices. Some of the ads reached government networks.

All of this is possible because the online marketing industry gathers enough personal data to identify people. Even government officials.

This should teach our politicians a much needed lesson: weak privacy protection exposes everyone, including (especially) them, to all sorts of threats.

Source:
https://citizenlab.ca/research/exposing-adfection-executive-summary/
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#privacy #DataProtection #GDPR #AdFection

So, Anthropic's slop machine marketing is going back from the pseudo-religious "Behold, my machine is both glorious and terrifying! Tremble in awe!" narrative to the emotionally manipulative "Our chatbot might have feelings, so could you please like it and be nice to it?!" tale?

Those insufferable people...
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#StopTheSlop #Slopposition #GoSlopYourself #LLMs #chatbots

Whoever figures out how to make the tech bros understand that they aren't the only living being on this planet should win the Nobel prize for everything.

This was something new for me. Today, I presented my first rather exploratory work "Tipping the Scales - The Weight of Legislative Challenges to Privacy Laws" at this year's Critical Legal Conference in London.

Each of the boards tries to raise awareness for the gravity (rather literally) of legislative interferences with our privacy rights by ... well ... being really heavy.
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#CLC2026 #privacy #DataProtection #GDPR

The European Union's privacy laws are ill equipped to deal with the pervert glasses of Meta & Co.

First, because you need to know that you've been recorded and who did the recording to file a complaint. You usually won't.
Second, because you can only file a complaint after your privacy has been violated. That's too late.
Third, because proceedings usually take years. That's too long.

A ban is the only way to protect our privacy!
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#SmartGlasses #PervertGlasses #Meta #Privacy #DataProtection

Digital privacy is more than just personal data protection. It's about being able to decide for ourselves if, when, and how we want to interact with technology.

You wouldn't want someone you don't know in your home, even if this person was wearing a blindfold, right? If you wouldn't tolerate it in the physical world, you shouldn't tolerate it in the digital.

It's not just about personal data, it's about personal spaces - physical and digital.
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#privacy #DataProtection

Next time someone tries to convince you that their local slop machine is "privacy friendly" and "fully GDPR-compliant", ask them to try this:

Take a glass of water. Pour it into the sea. Extract the same water from the sea again.

The same goes for our data once they're fed to a slop machine. There's nothing privacy friendly about the complete loss of control over our information. Running a slop machine locally doesn't change anything.
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#privacy #DataProtection #GDPR #LLMs #StopTheSlop

"But the LLMs won't just go away, right?"

Says who? The technology is ecologically and economically unsustainable. The people who are most enthusiastic about the slop machines are those who are trying to extract money by building or using them. The rest of us has to deal with the fallout somehow while others reap the benefits (in fictional valuations, not actual profits, mind you).

The technology is a failure. What is keeping it alive is tech bro fanaticism paired
with capitalist sociopathy.

"I don't care about privacy because I have nothing to hide" always misses the point.

Privacy is about being able to decide for yourself what others know about you and what they're allowed to do with what they know.

Privacy is about setting boundaries to technology and those who are building it.

Privacy is about having a say in who should get to shape our future.

A handful of billionaires (and an especially vile trillionaire)?

Or us?
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#privacy #DataProtection

Do you think we need more privacy? Well, so do I! Maybe we should talk?

I'm looking for collaborations, projects, and ways to promote privacy and privacy literacy (ideally offering some compensation). If you are (or your organization / company is) thinking about or already doing work on privacy-related issues that might benefit from my tech-critical, socio-legal perspective and experience in privacy education and outreach, please do not hesitate to reach out!
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#privacy #DataProtection #GDPR