Author: Kyle Bennett
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A Review of BSidesPGH
Recently I gave a talk at BSidesPGH, a cyber security conference in Pittsburgh. I wish I could send you the full recording, but unfortunately a big hunk of the talk was missed and now the replay isn’t even online 🥲. So I’ll do the best I can to summarize it up in a blog post…
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Nutritional labels for Digital Products? Yeah… Maybe!
The FCC is currently in the process of creating the “US Cyber Trust Mark”— a sort of “nutrition facts” for digital devices. If that sounds strange to you, think of all the different labels you rely on as a day-to-day consumer. I’m sure you’ve seen things like Fair Trade Certification Label, the USDA Organic Label,…
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BetterHelp Violated My Privacy, Now I’m Getting Paid
Diane, J.I., and myself often talk about where we want this business to be. Regularly we land on the same things: transparency, accountability, and the ability to reclaim your digital footprint from entities that aren’t using it in a respectful way. It upsets me to know that there are companies out there who hoover up…
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How We Became AbsolutelyNothing
By now you’ve probably asked yourself why did I decide to call my company AbsolutelyNothing. Well, it all begins with a vacation… A Bit About Timeshare Vacations My partner, Diane, and I were vacationing at a timeshare in Orlando, Florida. ☀️ This was a timeshare that my parents bought before I was born as an…
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How We’re Going to Kill the Cookie Banner
Cookie banners are everywhere. 🍪 You’ve probably seen them and been annoyed. We talked about types of cookies a few weeks ago, and then also touched on the annoyance of those “Allow Cookies” popups last week. This week we are going to talk about how we can get rid of those banners and popups altogether! The…
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If Cookies Came with a Nutritional Label, Would You Bite?
We expect a physical store to adjust it’s layout based on foot traffic, current promotions, and even the season. But the internet is not a physical store, it’s got more superpowers….
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What is a Cookie?
Cookies aren’t just tasty snacks for our Chief Barking Officer, Remy Bear (pictured above). They are a tool used by software engineers to alter the behavior of the sites with which you interact. So, how do cookies work? And what exactly is a cookie? A cookie, to begin with, is just a little packet of…
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Data Privacy My Mom Can Understand
Just earlier this week, I found myself trying to articulate the why behind our product to my mother. After my jumbled explanation, she simply said, “Why don’t you just stop all these companies from taking the data in the first place?” 🤦🏼♀️ Instantly, she had crystallized our mission better than any tech jargon I could…
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What We Do Here
Dear Reader, Simply put, we watch the watchers. Almost every company you interact with is collecting (and in many cases selling) data about you. A lawyer would say these companies have your consent because you clicked “I Agree” or ticked a checkbox somewhere. And technically they do have your consent, but in our opinion, they…