Psychology
An extract from It's Personal. The Hawthorne Effect, the Chinese social credit system, and why observing everyone does not protect the children it claims to protect.
Posts tagged "privacy"
The MEP investigating spyware was keeping his whole life on the phone that got hacked
Pegasus infected the phone of an MEP who sat on the committee investigating it - a real assault on democracy. It also came out that he kept fifteen years of everything on that one phone and missed three warnings from Apple - and that's a failure we have to talk about too.
The United Nations runs Google's ad-tech on its own website, without consent, while telling the rest of us to account for AI's footprint
The UN demands AI accountability while running Google ad-tech, analytics and tracking on its own website - with no consent and a measurable, avoidable carbon cost.
The problem with Consent Management Platforms is they are unlawful by design
Every CMP I have looked at in fifteen years sets a cookie before the user has consented to anything. That is a direct breach of Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive, restated by the CJEU in Planet49 (C-673/17), and reinforced by the Belgian decision against the IAB TCF. This piece explains, step by step, what a lawful consent flow actually looks like and why every cookie banner you have ever seen is wrong.
Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.
Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.
Anthropic issued with a Cease and Desist
Anthropic ignored the Claude Desktop spyware findings. A formal Cease and Desist has now been issued, with 72 hours before criminal and civil complaints follow.
Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop
Anthropic's Claude Desktop silently installs a Native Messaging bridge into seven Chromium browsers, including browsers Anthropic's own documentation says it does not support, and browsers the user has not even installed.
The Beast behind the Browser: Every Privacy Vulnerability in Chrome and How to Catch It
A forensic reference to every client-side privacy vulnerability in Google Chrome — fingerprinting, storage tracking, header leaks — and how to detect each.
Data Sovereignty in light of US uncertainty
EU and businesses are abandoning US tech giants for open source and self-hosted alternatives. Why data sovereignty matters now more than ever.
Welcome to my Blog
Introducing the That Privacy Guy! blog — expert insights on privacy, data protection, GDPR, AI governance, and cyber security from Alexander Hanff.
Digital Psychology: Why Privacy is so important for Self Determination
Psychographic profiling and surveillance capitalism erode our autonomy. Why privacy is fundamental to self-determination, free thought, and democracy.