What emotions do you feel when you see the Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge logos? You might feel a sense of familiarity, comfort, or the sense that you are looking at something you are used to using.
Do you feel fear? If not, you probably should. In this post, I am going to be examining the data privacy issues of modern browsers and introduce alternative options that are focused on keeping you, and your data, safe.
Last week, I received an email from Google stating that my email and password had been leaked in a recent data breach. Like many people, I’m guilty of reusing the same password for multiple accounts, so the leak had compromised my information in a number of different locations. I was advised to change all of my passwords and to use different passwords for each of my important accounts.
For the last couple years, I have periodically heard the term “deepfake videos”, but prior to completing the research for this post, I didn’t know much about them. In fact, my knowledge of deepfake videos was limited to a few key facts that I’d heard repeated on the news and the internet: the average person can’t tell the difference between a real video and a deepfake video, anyone with a computer can make one, they will soon be everywhere, and they will definitely destabilize democracy.
On November 2, 1988, the Morris worm became one of the first large-scale attacks on the then-nascent Internet. Robert Morris, a Cornell student, had intended to write a program to measure the size of the Internet — but thanks to a bug, his program ended up shutting down thousands of computer systems.
