The Implosion of LastPass is a Stark Reminder About the Importance of Due Diligence and the Influence of Effective Promotion Let’s cut to the chase: if you had but a fleeting opportunity to ask three pivotal questions prior to hiring a brand spanking new supplier that you plan to trust with your most sensitive details, they would be these: If they are as secure as they claim, do they have…

How do you sell #smart technology to consumers when there is an #ethical responsibility to gain informed consent about the real risk of #harm presented by connected devices? The quasi-infinite connectivity of the #Internet of Things (#IoT) could mean that everyone will eventually need to watch a #privacy briefing prior…

Will 2023 be the year #banks and telcos are finally #hacked at scale using #deepfake voice technology? One of the most puzzling trends of recent years has been the counterintuitive adoption of #voiceprint technology to authenticate callers using vocal characteristics such as pitch, timbre and tone.

Acceptance is enabling. There is no other way to say it, but Canadians simply can’t be bothered to question data breaches, to report privacy violations or to care about the security of their own data in the hands of big name companies. …

But that’s not a reason to believe those who downplay any data breach. Are you being gaslit about the importance of large scale data breaches that “only” expose your name and email address? Do you get the sense that leaks of financial data including credit card numbers and other replaceable…

Since 1948, privacy has been defined as a fundamental human right recognized in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights and in many other international and regional treaties. But that is not the case in Canada, where privacy interests are merely “essential to…

Because Edtech Without Integrity is Fraud After two decades in information security, I was a latecomer to the edtech party back in 2016 and what I found was a land rush for the last frontier of intangible assets: children’s personal data. To be clear, 2016 was a watershed year in…

Valentine’s Day 2018 marked the moment I learned that the fear of public embarrassment could motivate even a Canadian public school board to use disinformation and intimidation tactics to cover up a security breach. Caused by the botched deployment of a cloud-based ‘educational technology’ (“edtech”) system and plagued from the…

A few times a year, we are struck by statements, images and speeches that have not stood the test of time due to changes in public discourse, the evolution of critical thinking and just plain modern trends. One speech that has aged well is Robert Mueller’s 2011 discourse for the…