It’s the Digital Security Training team at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), with security news that keeps you, your sources, and your devices safe. If someone has shared this newsletter with you, please subscribe here.

In the news

Google has a habit of hitting the brakes on products and features — so much so that it’s become something of a meme to be “killed by Google.” This time it decided to backtrack on its long-standing plan to replace traditional tracking in its Chrome browser. Full disclosure: I worked there and I have opinions.

For the past few years, Google has been rolling out a replacement for advertising based on third-party cookies, files embedded in the browser to help websites recognize you and provide continuous services. This week, the search company announced it plans to instead give users “an informed choice” about whether to use third-party cookies.

This news comes after years of sparring with the advertising industry on its alternative interest-based tracking tools (“Ad topics”) designed to gather information within the browser on a user’s interests, based on their activity, and package it up alongside similar cohorts of users for ad targeting purposes. Read more.

What you can do

  • While we’re not yet sure how exactly Chrome would deliver this choice between one type of ad tracking and another, we can say you can turn off ad topics and third-party cookies in your Chrome settings right now. In your Chrome settings, navigate to “Privacy and security” and disable both, or navigate to the following:
  • Whether through Ad topics or traditional tracking cookies, you can disable a lot of tracking with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Badger browser extension. Check out their blog post on this issue and get started using Privacy Badger.
  • Note that this is different from blocking advertisements entirely. If you want to block advertisements, uBlock Origin is your friend. You can always disable it for the media organizations you want to support or, better yet, show your support by subscribing or donating to them.

Updates from our team

  • Our digital security intern Kevin Pham, who has been at the helm of the newsletter over the past few weeks, also just put together a well-researched and concise article on end-to-end encrypted note-taking apps for journalists. Read his blog post.
  • We’re hiring a Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL) consultant to help us develop a monitoring and evaluation framework for our digital security training courses. Does this sound like you, or do you know someone who would be a good fit? Check out the job description and please share widely.
  • We put a fresh coat of paint on our guide to two-factor authentication. Give it a read.

Our team is always ready to assist journalists with digital security concerns. Reach out here, and stay safe and secure out there.

Best,

Martin

–

Martin Shelton

Principal Researcher

Freedom of the Press Foundation