“If Chris Soghoian points out a technology-related privacy problem, then it should probably be taken seriously,” Marcia Hofmann, a senior staff attorney at San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently told Wired magazine. “Nobody else is doing what Chris does—at least not at his level.”
Indeed, that’s why this Thursday’s PD+ call with Chris Soghoian on how to protect your privacy online should be really eye-opening.
As Wired noted last fall, Soghoian–a journalist and PhD candidate in computer science at Indiana University Bloomington–has a knack for spotting serious privacy holes in all kinds of web services, doing the technical digging to document the problem, and has often pushed companies into making significant changes in response. Now armed with a grant from the Open Society Foundations, he’s working on a website called PrivacyReports.org, which will help ordinary web users understand how well the search engines, email providers, cell phone companies, and online backup services they use handle security and privacy.
On this call, we’ll do a status check with Soghoian and find out what steps you can take now be safer online, who the good guys and the bad guys are, and why he thinks the current “cybersecurity” measures being pushed in Congress could make things worse.
April 23, 2012