“Hey Alexa, play me the Beastie Boys.” “Ok Google, find me a good Christmas present for a 14 yr. old girl who collects Star Wars figures.” “Greg? Greg, it appears your milk is past its expiry date. Please consider buying fresh.” – said your ‘smart’ refrigerator to you one morning. This would be even more […]
In my recent post, I wrote about how to consider your own actions online, and how to go about addressing the concerns created by those actions – that’s a long-winded way of saying I wrote about Threat Assessment. This time, let’s look at one kind of ‘threat’: You are 13, and now realizing that […]
How many of you like Beyonce? What about Imagine Dragons? AC DC? Rachmaninoff??? It's pretty likely that nobody reading this will like ALL of them, or even ANY of them. The point is: while pretty much everyone likes "music", no two people's specific combination of likes and dislikes is identical. This is analogous to people's […]
Almost two billion people have accounts on Facebook. More than 40 million of those rely on Facebook’s basic services to access the Internet. Facebook owns the most-heavily-used messaging service in the world (WhatsApp – with over a billion installs), as well as the most popular ‘photo-sharing’ platform in Instagram – over 800 million active […]
With the turning of the New Year, and the miserable weather Toronto gets every January, you might be forgiven for keeping your head nestled firmly under the covers, hoping cold would pass and you could go on, oblivious to the miseries outside the window, and to those lurking inside our computers, too. Since last I […]
It's been some months since we hosted the Toronto-made expose of the Internet, a short documentary named Black Code. The film is inspired by the book of the same name, and the work of its author, Ronald Deibert, the director of local think tank, Citizen Lab. At that time, we felt that Black Code was a […]
It was one year ago that two monumental events shook the ground beneath our feet: In America, a new President ushered in an uncertain and tumultuous period. And closer to home, the library launched its Digital Privacy Initiative! Two events that, while not equal in scale and scope, nonetheless changed our way of looking at […]
The Internet we use every single day – to do our banking, rent our cars, plan our travel, manage our kid's school bake sale, read the news, and interact with friends – that Internet looks like this picture. It's like a sky of a billion points of light, twinkling with potential and wonder. But according […]
… and you will be horrified by what it reveals! The acclaimed documentary Black Code comes to Toronto Library for one night only, so mark your calendars. Many of you will have heard that Google reads everything that passes through a Gmail account, or you will have heard that Facebook tracks you around the interwebs […]
We live in an era of unprecedented surveillance – with a wealth of our information collected, analyzed, and sold, often without our knowledge or consent. Governments and law enforcement enjoy broad new legal authority, and the technological means, to pry into the personal lives of thousands or even millions of people at once. Private companies […]