We need to support privacy, not for those of us who have "nothing to hide", but for bothersome people like investigative journalists and activists, without which our democracy would crumble

Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are technologies that provide increased privacy or secrecy for the persons whose data is processed, stored and/or collected by software and systems. Three PETs that are valuable and ready for use are: Differential Privacy, Distributed & Federated Analysis & Learning, and Encrypted Computation. They provide rigorous guarantees for privacy and as such are becoming increasingly popular to provide data in while minimizing violations of private data.

A summary of how Tor works and how you can use it. It also covers The Tor Browser Bundle, Hidden Services, Tails and looks at some of the controversies around Tor.

In our keynote for goto 2014, Erik and I consider an aspect of software professionals taking responsibility for how our software affects society. One of the primary concerns at the moment is privacy, which is being undermined by mass surveillance. Email is currently problematic because the movement of email to services has led to a concentration of email provision that makes it easier to monitor. We need to improve privacy by working to widen the use of encryption for email, so that the cost of mass surveillance becomes prohibitive. The challenge for this is primarily a challenge of user-experience and software packaging, not something that requires great understanding of cryptography.

At goto Aarhus 2014, the keynotes by myself, Erik Dörnenburg, and Tim Bray spent a good bit of time considering the issue of privacy on the internet. Afterwards Ola Bini got together with us to discuss this issue, the current state of affairs, and what we developers should be doing about it.

Datensparsamkeit is a German word that's difficult to translate properly into English. It's an attitude to how we capture and store data, saying that we should only handle data that we really need.