Privacy

When looking at the communications of the major players in the operating system market (for both computers and smartphones) there are one company that repeatedly talks about privacy more than the others. The company I am thinking about is Apple. Their continuous talk about privacy got me curious, how do they handle their users privacy. And when curious it’s time to investigate, so I dug into their Privacy Policy (Updated June 1, 2021), and my thoughts resulted in this blogpost. ...

This investigation should not be taken as a full review of the browsers, but wishes to highlight the differences that different browsers have in how they handle user privacy. The test aims to give an overview, not describe in detail what each browser does or does not do. Methodology To perform this test I created a new virtual machine based on Windows MSEdge win10 VM. In this VM I installed the browsers intended to be tested, using the default configuration. After that I configured BurpSuite as a proxy for the VM, so that all traffic is routed through it. This way it will document all the traffic that the browser in the VM is sending. ...

I’ve gotten a bit curious about what data different companies are collecting about me. This have led to a couple of GDPR requests to companies to provide the data so I can analyse it. In this post I will share my thoughts about the content of the report I got from Spotify, and the process of fetching the data. The Download Process The process to get access to your data is quite straight forward. There are clear descriptions on how to download your data under privacy settings, where you can request a download. The collection process takes a while and an email is sent when your data is ready to be downloaded. In the email there are a link that allows you to download a zip archive containing your information. ...

We live in a world where technology compete for our attention, especially on our smartphones. Apps do everything they can to get us to open the app, and not leave it. At least that’s how I feel, with endless newsfeeds, notifications and autoplay, it’s so easy to just open the phone and get stuck. The feeling is not new, but the thing that pinned it down for me was the book Zucked by Roger McNamee [1]. It highlighted the reason for the feelings, both why companies do it and what they do. By using data companies have on their users they maximise their consumption. This can be in the form of video content on a streaming platform or browsing the newsfeed on social media. ...