UR Protects You in Three Ways:
Focusing on three axes—security, anti-tracking and anti-profiling—we explain how UR protects your privacy and keeps you safe online.
Focusing on three axes—security, anti-tracking and anti-profiling—we explain how UR protects your privacy and keeps you safe online.
Corporations can now compile and analyze unprecedented volumes of unstructured data created by humans, such as the text contained in company documents, email, instant messaging, and social media. This poses the question one of the greatest ethical challenges of our time: how we use or abuse digital technologies and the data they generate.
What happens to this data, and can it be used against us?
Read more at the Harvard Business Review
If you are traveling through the US border, you may be subjected to an invasive device search. This is beginning to raise questions amongst those who want to protect the private data on our computers, phones, and other digital devices.
On these grounds, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released a new guide for those traveling to the US. In a long or short format, this guide gives travelers the facts they need in order to prepare for border crossings while protecting their digital information.
See more on the EFF website: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/digital-privacy-us-border-new-how-guide-eff
Useful resources:
Digital Privacy Guide at the U.S. Border
EFF’s pocket guide
Your constitutional rights
Panopticlick is a website run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). It analyzes your browser and sees how safe it is against online tracking techniques.
With our new privacy update now available on both PC and Mac, we decided to test it.
Here, you can see that UR has two green checkmarks—for “blocking tracking ads” and for “blocking invisible trackers.” Chrome, on the other hand, has all red x’s. This is because Chrome needs to track its users for its business model—your search and browsing data fuel its advertising industry.
Two check marks are great! However, we’re most excited about this, straight from the EFF:
All of us here at UR are really pleased about this! Our hard work is paying off 🙂
There is still work to do—fingerprinting, for example is a big project for which we’ve been doing R&D for months. More to come on that soon.
Have you tested UR? Head over to Panopticlick to see your own results!
We told our beta testers back in January that we were shifting the focus of UR and concentrating on privacy and security features.
Our goal is to build a web browser that gives you easy-to-use tools to protect your privacy and keep your data safe.
This beta version is a big step forward in our vision of a browser built to protect users. More to come in the near future!
Please uninstall your current version of UR and re-install this one.
Privacy Features
• Qwant as default search provider
• All reporting to Google’s servers has been removed
• Third party cookies blocked
• Built-in ad blocker and VPN (500Mb free/month)
• Privacy settings by default
Security Features
• Virus scanner
• Alerts for suspicious websites
• Doubled RSA key encryption
For the nerds: check out the exhaustive list of privacy features.
Test UR for its privacy features!
• Panopticlick is website run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that shows you how safe (or unsafe!) your browser is against tracking (check this link why you’d want to use a tool like Panopticlick). See how UR stacks up and share it!
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Join the beta newsletter here: https://www.ur-browser.com/en-US/Press
You’ve probably heard about data encryption before, but if you still aren’t exactly sure what it is, here’s the scoop on data encryption:
The purpose of data encryption is to protect digital data confidentiality. Data encryption uses an algorithm, which translates the data into another form or code. Without a secret encryption key, this data is unreadable.
Encryption is one of the most widely used and effective data security methods used by organizations to transfer data.
• When you use your credit card online, your computer encrypts that information so that others can’t steal your personal data as it is being transferred.
• When you see the image, it means that there is an encrypted link between the website’s server and your browser.
From sports brands to pharmaceutical corporations, companies worldwide are gathering more data than ever due to boost of Internet connected devices now integrated into their IT infrastructure.
By May 2018, new European Union rules related to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will go into effect and could potentially interfere with companies that bank on collecting and processing user data for their businesses.
The dilemma for these companies experimenting with Artificial Intelligence (AI) begins with profiling, which is essentially the ability for companies to use automation to determine certain characteristics of their individual users.
When companies use data analytics and related automation technologies to predict whether someone is likely to be a good worker or be more prone to a specific illness, that business is taking part in profiling.
“Companies need to carefully determine how to use their various types of data for different purposes that don’t potentially put them at risk of a violation. In some cases, that may mean a company should leave out certain demographic data when debuting a specific service overseas.”
Executives of major tech companies like Cisco and Microsoft are advocating for the technology community to “explain very well” complex and misunderstood AI technologies to policy makers who may be ill-informed.
As the EU prides itself on protecting the personal data of an individual, these companies conducting business in the Europe must be extremely cautious with how they handle and process their customer data.
Read more on Fortune: http://fortune.com/2017/02/14/google-microsoft-cisco-privacy-profiling-artificial-intelligence/
Image credit: Shutterstock
Unfortunately, the interminable sphere of Big Data can get really boring and confusing. This is why cartoonist Josh Neufeld and Michael Keller of Al Jazeera America collaborated to create “Terms of Service: Understanding our Role in the World of Big Data,” a comic novella sum field guide that demystifies Big Data and its implications on daily life.
The comic itself is centered around how data is handled in the United States and explores the tradeoffs between giving up personal data and how that data could be used against you. It answers many questions, such as:
• Which technologies might seem invasive today, that five years from now will seem normal?
• As technology users, how do we keep up with the pace without letting our data determine who we are?
French newspaper Le Monde recently published the first 30 pages of the French version of the comic. Recent concerns about the collection and sharing of data have brought Big Data to the forefront of privacy discussions.
Terms of Service, http://projects.aljazeera.com/2014/terms-of-service/#1
Al Jazeera America, http://america.aljazeera.com/tools/pressreleases/al-jazeera-america-releases-first-graphic-novella.html
Want to change your VPN location? First, click on the ninja icon in the upper right-hand corner. Then, click on your current VPN location (the flag).
You will now see all the available VPNs, beginning with the most recommended. From there, you can choose any location on the grid.
Protect your data online with UR. Learn more about our free privacy features.
Malware is short for malicious software, meaning software that can be used to compromise computer functions, steal data, bypass access controls, or otherwise, cause harm to the host computer. Here are explanations on the five most observed types of malicious programs to watch out for:
Adware is a form of financially-supported malware that usually presents itself in the form of unwanted advertisements displayed to a user. The Internet is filled with these types of programs that can hijack your PC for profit. Most of them are hidden inside so-called “free” downloads and pop-up ads that forcibly install software on systems with active vulnerabilities.
This type of malware covertly collects information and transmits it to interested parties. Information gathered includes web sites visited, browser and system information and IP address. Spyware does not have any infection mechanisms and is usually dropped by a Trojan. A hacker uses spyware to track your internet activities and steal your information without you being aware of it. Credit card numbers and passwords are the two most common targets.
Just like the trojan horse from ancient greek mythology, this type of malware is disguised as a safe program designed to trick users, so that they unwittingly install it on their own system, and later are sabotaged by it. Normally, the hacker uses a trojan to steal both financial and personal information. It can do this by creating a “backdoor” to your computer that allows the hacker to remotely control it.
Like a virus that can infect a person, a computer virus is a contagious piece of code that infects software and then spreads from file to file on a system. When infected software or files are shared between computers, the virus then spreads to the new host.
Similarly, worms also replicate themselves and spread when they infect a computer. The difference, however, between a worm and a virus is that a worm doesn’t necessitate the help of a human or host program to spread. Instead, they self-replicate and spread across networks without the guidance of a hacker or a file/program to latch onto.
Surf safe with UR: all downloads are automatically scanned for viruses and if you arrive on a suspicious website, you will immediately be alerted.
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