web privacy – Noise

Apple’s Private Relay Is Being Blocked

Bruce Schneier — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 15:09:37 +0000

Some European cell phone carriers, and now T-Mobile, are blocking Apple’s Private Relay anonymous browsing feature. This could be an interesting battle to watch. Slashdot thread.

People Are Increasingly Choosing Private Web Search

Bruce Schneier — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 12:29:00 +0000

DuckDuckGo has had a banner year:

And yet, DuckDuckGo. The privacy-oriented search engine netted more than 35 billion search queries in 2021, a 46.4% jump over 2020 (23.6 billion). That’s big. Even so, the company, which bills itself as the “Internet privacy company,” offering a search engine and other products designed to “empower you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online without any tradeoffs,” remains a rounding error compared to Google in search.

I use it. It’s not as a good a search engine as Google. Or, at least, Google often gets me what I want faster than DuckDuckGo does. To solve that, I use use the feature that allows me to use Google’s search engine through DuckDuckGo: ...

Is Microsoft Stealing People’s Bookmarks?

Bruce Schneier — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 13:53:54 +0000

I received email from two people who told me that Microsoft Edge enabled synching without warning or consent, which means that Microsoft sucked up all of their bookmarks. Of course they can turn synching off, but it’s too late.

Has this happened to anyone else, or was this user error of some sort? If this is real, can some reporter write about it?

(Not that “user error” is a good justification. Any system where making a simple mistake means that you’ve forever lost your privacy isn’t a good one. We see this same situation with sharing contact lists with apps on smartphones. Apps will repeatedly ask, and only need you to accidentally click “okay” once.)...