Buried in the Wired piece, though, are a few references to a March 1970 Times article about the threat of records going digital. So I went digging in our archives and found it. It’s also quite a read with 2019 eyes. Some of the best nuggets include:

Whether a nationwide network of computerized data banks may not significantly affect peoples’ lives and endanger their privacy has been subject of controversy for several years. This will be the first time, however, that the question of whether civil liberties can function at all amid such a proliferation of personal data will be scrutinized on such a wide scale.

Ah, to be young and not online. Also:

At present, he asserted, there are no laws or court decisions in the country supporting the individual’s right to see, contest, change or eliminate any of the information about him in a data bank. This information may include “facts, statistics, inaccuracies and rumors,” Dr. Westin said, about virtually every phase of a person’s life, his marital troubles, jobs, school history, childhood, sex life and political activities. “Almost inevitably, transferring information from a manual file to a computer triggers a threat to civil liberties, to privacy, to a man’s very humanity,” Dr. Westin said, “because access is so simple.”

Westin’s comments were, in part, a reference to Retail Credit’s business and scheduled hearings that month that would help establish the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

[If you’re online — and, well, you are — chances are someone is using your information. We’ll tell you what you can do about it. Sign up for our limited-run newsletter.]

Thank You, San Francisco

Last Wednesday nearly 300 of you joined us at the San Francisco Public Library to talk about the privacy reckoning. You had wonderful questions and I was so pleased to meet many of you after. If you weren’t able to make it, the talk is online, here. We hope to see many more of you soon!

Tip of the Week: Jumbo Privacy App

This is the 16th Privacy Project newsletter, which means we’ve collected and shared a good number of privacy tips. I was running a bit low on ideas last week when I solicited some recommendations from Twitter. A number of people suggested a free iPhone app called Jumbo, which helps manage your privacy across Twitter, Facebook, Google search and Amazon’s Alexa. I downloaded it and think it’s worth sharing here.

Think of Jumbo as a privacy assistant. It inserts itself among the four platforms and helps you clean up your social presence by deleting tweets, search histories and voice recordings from Alexa, and limiting the visibility of posts. Other features include disabling facial recognition and location tracking, turning off targeted ads, protecting facial recordings and protecting against online tracking. The Verge has a nice write-up of it, here.

Why I like it: Jumbo pretty much only does things that you can do yourself manually, but it’s refreshing to be able to outsource it to an app. This is especially helpful for less tech-savvy people in your life who might feel overwhelmed by the privacy conversation and feel powerless.