Category: Privacy

Mozilla has a cute video on the open, privacy protecting web

Check it out here at The Web We Want: An Open Letter: And the note Mozilla posted with the video: Our right to a free and open Internets has been under threat lately. The NSA — btw, that stands for the National Security Agency, which has the fancy responsibility of analyzing and acting upon security…
On Bringing Manners to Markets

Privacy in the physical world has been well understood and fairly non-controversial for thousands of years. We get it, for example, with clothing, doors, curtains and window shades. These each provide privacy by design, because they control visibility and access to our private places and spaces. The virtual world, however, is very young, dating roughly back to…
We are not fish and advertising is not food

This is how the Internet looks to the online advertising business today: This is how they approach it: And this is the result: Advertising is a huge source of the “data pollution” Fred Wilson talked about at LeWeb a few weeks ago. (See here, starting at about 23 minutes in.) What’s wrong with this view,…
Data Privacy Legal Hack-A-thon

Customer Commons is supporting, and board member, Mary Hodder, is hosting the Bay Area event. Additionally, there are NYC and London locations. Please join us if you are interested: This is an unprecedented year documenting our loss of Privacy. Never before have we needed to stand up and team up to do something about it.…
Omie Update (version 0.2)

We’re overdue an update on the Omie Project…., so here goes. To re-cap: We at Customer Commons believe there is room/ need for a device that sits firmly on the side of the individual when it comes to their role as a customer or potential customer. That can and will mean many things and iterations…
Surf safely with Web Pal

It’s time to draw the line on surveillance. Today nearly every commercial website infects our browsers with tracking files that report our activities back to parties we may not know or trust. So we’re providing a way to draw that line: Web Pal — a browser extension that blocks tracking and advertising*, eliminating the browser…
Customer Commons Research: 92% of People Engage in Some Strategy to Hide Personal Data

We launched our first research paper today: Lying and Hiding in the Name of Privacy (PDF here) by Mary Hodder and Elizabeth Churchill. Our data supporting the paper is here: Addendum Q&A and shortly we’ll upload a .xls of the data for those who want to do a deep dive into the results. We all know that…
Lying and Hiding in the Name of Privacy

Authors: Mary Hodder and Elizabeth Churchill Creative Commons licenced: by-nc-nd ©Customer Commons, 2013 Contact: Mary Hodder, hodder@gmail.com Abstract A large percentage of individuals employ artful dodges to avoid giving out requested personal information online when they believe at least some of that information is not required. These dodges include hiding personal details, intentionally submitting incorrect…
Meet Omie: a truly personal mobile device

This is Omie: She is, literally, a clean slate. And she is your clean slate. Not Apple’s. Not Google’s. Not some phone company’s. She can be what you want her to be, do what you want her to do, run whatever apps you want her to run, and use data you alone collect and control. Being a…
Wallets are personal

A lot of big companies are eager to get their hands in your pockets — literally. They want your mobile phone to work as a digital wallet, and they want the digital wallet app you use to be theirs. Naturally, this looks like it should be a big business — and to some degree it…