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The Guardian - Back to homeThe Guardian

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is also a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

February 2022

  • ‘After years of slowing US growth, Facebook just experienced its first-ever US shrinkage, which precipitated a $230bn stock crash, the largest in global corporate history.’

    I’ve been waiting 15 years for Facebook to die. I’m more hopeful than ever

    Cory Doctorow
    Facebook is struggling to retain users, fending off regulation, trying to pivot to VR, and paying a massive wage premium to attract the workers it needs to make any of this happen. The company is on the ropes

January 2020

  • Smart cities are studded with sensors that monitor what is going on with their people, vehicles and infrastructure.

    The case for ... cities that aren't dystopian surveillance states

    Imagine your smartphone knew everything about the city – but the city didn’t know anything about you. Wouldn’t that be truly ‘smart’?

May 2017

  • Drone silhouette flying above Dubai

    Technology is making the world more unequal. Only technology can fix this

    Cory Doctorow
    The inequality of badly-run states is boosted by technology – but technology also makes it easier to destabilise them. So: which future will prevail?

September 2016

  • headphones

    DRM products are defective by design. Time to tell users what they're buying

    Cory Doctorow in Los Angeles
    The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling for the labelling of products encumbered with digital rights management. It’s increasingly important as we trust technology with our lives

July 2016

  • US Capitol in Washington

    America's broken digital copyright law is about to be challenged in court

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the US government over ‘unconstitutional’ use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

June 2016

  • hand holding credit card and wallet by laptop

    Don't buy it? When tech firms get it wrong, that's not enough

    Cory Doctorow in Los Angeles
    With big tech business making regular political and ethical blunders, it is our responsibility to complain – and let them know they must do better

May 2016

  • Ten years is an eternity in ​​web years, and everything can change in a decade.

    Why the future of web browsers belongs to the biggest tech firms

    Cory Doctorow in Los Angeles
    Changes made to browser standards will make it harder for new companies to disrupt the status quo and cement the power of Google and Apple

March 2016

  • Apple FBI hearing in Congress

    Forget Apple's fight with the FBI – our privacy catastrophe has only just begun

    Cory Doctorow in Los Angeles

    The privacy crisis is a disaster of our own making – and now the tech firms who gathered our data are trying to make money out of privacy

February 2016

  • Children's hands

    The FBI wants a backdoor only it can use – but wanting it doesn’t make it possible

    Cory Doctorow
    Much like climate change denialists, politicians continue to debate encryption – ignoring the consensus of experts that it must not be compromised

January 2016

  • Indian demonstrators

    'Poor internet for poor people': India's activists fight Facebook connection plan

    Ferocious momentum continues to build against social media giant’s bid to take charge of the country’s internet through a program called Free Basics

December 2015

  • Google’s prototype self-driving car at the Google campus in Mountain View, California

    The problem with self-driving cars: who controls the code?

    Cory Doctorow
  • National Security Agency logo

    'I want to join the NSA. What do you think of that?'

    Cory Doctorow

November 2015

  • Many companies start emailing customers without their explicit consent - one brief visit or online purchase is enough. Mailstrom Photograph: Darron Birgenheier/flickr

    Death by spam: lazy email marketing is killing our inboxes

    It took Cory Doctorow 30 days to unsubscribe from 3,000 ‘legitimate’ email lists – the kind of marketing that threatens to overload this critical, federated platform

October 2015

  • The Ashley Madison app displayed on a smartphone

    Why is it so hard to convince people to care about privacy?

    Every week or two, from now on, will see new privacy disasters, each worse than the last

September 2015

  • iOS 9 + ad block: double-whammy

    How to save online advertising

    Cory Doctorow
    The answer isn’t complicated, it’s just hard: find a way for publishers and advertisers to deal with one another directly

August 2015

June 2015

  • using a computer

    The shrinking of the big data promise

    Cory Doctorow
    Markets do not have much patience for a commitment to techniques that don’t deliver. Unfortunately, spy agencies aren’t subject to this discipline
  • internet

    The internet is the answer to all the questions of our time

    Cory Doctorow
    Woven into the fabric of every element of our lives, the internet isn’t the most important fight we have, but it is the most foundational
  • LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - MAY 21: Prime Minister David Cameron and Home secretary Theresa May are accompanied by immigration enforcement officers into a home in Southall in London following an early morning raid on the property that yielded three arrests of illegal immigrants, on May 21, 2015 in London, England. Despite pledging in 2010 to reduce migration numbers to less than 100,000, new immigration figures reveal that net migration to the UK reached 318,000 last year, the highest in a decade, increasing more

    David Cameron, the 'snooper's charter' will not make us safer

    Cory Doctorow
    The UK government appears to have swallowed a fly – and it’s not the bad guys who’ll die, but our liberty
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