A recent study found that most people aren’t taking the time to properly wipe data off their hard drives before they resell them. The researchers bought 200 used hard drives and found that a whopping 59% of the drives still had data that was accessible, including “employment and payroll records, family and holiday photos (along

[UPDATE: This is currently free while in beta, but in the future may not be.] This will be a simple one: Mozilla (maker of Firefox) is trialing a new, free VPN for its browser and you should use it. It’s called Firefox Private Network. It’s a free plugin for Firefox (which is the browser you

Our mobile phone numbers today have become our unique identifiers, even more so than our full names. While you’ve probably run across at least one other person who shares your name, our mobile numbers are guaranteed to be globally unique. And since we can port these numbers to any service, we tend to keep these

When we surf the web, there are several ways that our activity can be tracked. But one spy we often overlook is our internet service providers. Not just our home internet provider, but also our cellular service provider. HTTPS Everywhere Thankfully, in recent years, HTTPS has been much more widely adopted on the internet. That

Marketing firms love to tell us that we control our privacy – you simply need to opt out of tracking! Like Dorothy, we’ve had the power all along. Just click your heels three times and uncheck all those pesky tracking options under Settings… somewhere. Just call customer service and speak to a representative. Just mail

Two years after arguably the worst data breach in US history, the Federal Trade Commission has proposed an Equifax settlement to provide some restitution for the 148 million affected Americans. Unfortunately, it may not help you much. The Devil’s in the Details First of all, note that the settlement is still just a proposal. It

[This article is part of a Beginners Week blog series from my publisher, Apress.] While humans have had several millennia to adapt to the dangers of the natural world and many decades to react to the advancements of the modern age, the virtual world of the internet is relatively new. The risks of the physical

As Independence Day rolls around for those of us in the USA, our right to privacy is under attack from many angles. While surveillance capitalism is the area I tend to discuss most, our own democratic governments are perhaps the most existential threat to individual privacy. Welcome to Big Brother 2.0. Going Dark? The leaders

If the eyes are the window to the soul, then it should come as no surprise in the age of surveillance capitalism that marketers are clamoring to look deeply into yours. That’s metaphorically speaking, of course. In reality, it’s more skin deep. As humans, we’ve been trained since birth and via natural selection to rely

A critical vulnerability has been found in older versions of Microsoft Windows. If you’re affected, you need to patch your operating system immediately (see below). If you know anyone with an older PC, you need to make sure they’re aware of this ticking time bomb. But what you really need to do, frankly, is update