Tracking Opt-Outs Are Useless, Cal.com's Closed Source Chaos, Both Good & Bad Political News, and More!
Our top stories this week:
- Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit
- Mastodon receives Sovereign Tech Agency funding
- Cal.com is going closed source. Discourse is not.
- Republican Mutiny Sinks Trump’s Push to Extend Warrantless Surveillance
- Netgear Scores the First Exemption From the FCC’s Foreign-Made Router Ban
- Federal Government Announces Bipartisan “Parents Decide Act” to Protect Kids Online
TWIP Live 🔴
Updates from the Team
New Interview: Carissa Véliz on AI
Time for another heavy-hitting interview! Recently Nate got to spend a little bit of time with Carissa Véliz, professor of ethics at Oxford and author of Privacy is Power, which we highly recommend. Our conversation centered primarily on AI but with a focus on privacy, ethics, and what we can do retake our societal destiny back from the AI companies. Her new book, Prophecy, comes out on April 21st. In the meantime the interview will be available on the 19th on YouTube and PeerTube.
News
This week's news briefs talk about HackerOne pausing their Bug Bounty program due to the rise of AI bug reports, India abandoning biometric ID app requirements (for now), a Fiverr data breach, Mastodon's announcement that end-to-end encrypted DMs are coming soon, Chrome adding defenses against cookie-stealing malware, and privacy concerns from librarians in Canada.
Sources
Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit
According to an audit from a company called webXray, 55% of sites it checked set an ad cookie in a user's browser even when the user opted out via Global Privacy Control (GPC). Needless to say, the companies disputed these findings. GPC is meant to be the more enforceable replacement to Do Not Track requests, which were a huge failure and ironically often made users easier to track.
Matthew Gault