Jun. 9, 2020
Earlier this year, Bleeping Computer reported how invite links to private groups of messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram were visible on Google, letting anyone join the groups. This week, security researcher Athul Jayaram highlighted an issue with WhatsApp’s “wa.me” domain “leaking” contact phone numbers on Google. As stated by Jayaram and confirmed by BleepingComputer, there is no “robots.txt” file on “wa.me” or “api.whatsapp.com” domains that instructs search engines not to crawl phone numbers on the website.
May. 17, 2020
Temperature-scanning $7,000 helmets can catch people running a fever. But experts are skeptical about how helpful temperature scanning will really be. Chinese police, health staff, and transport workers have been using smart helmets to monitor people for high temperatures in the fight against COVID-19.
May. 15, 2020
A huge data dump includes the personal information of tens of millions of people and where they have met – and its origin is a mystery. The breach includes almost 90GB of people’s personal data, including details of where they have been and met people. But there is no clue where the information has actually come from in the first place.
May. 14, 2020
Another amendment blocking the FBI surveillance failed by just one vote Wednesday, bringing McConnell’s proposal one step closer to becoming law. The Senate is expected to vote Wednesday to renew the 2001 Patriot Act, and Mitch McConnell is pushing an amendment to the law that would expand the FBI’s surveillance powers. An amendment proposed by McConnell would, for the first time ever, let the FBI collect records on Americans’ web-browsing and search histories without a warrant.
May. 8, 2020
Cookies today are doing all kinds of bad things, but did you know that the original creators wanted to stop that? I had a discussion the other day about GDPR, ePrivacy and all those problems for publishers, and I pointed out that the way we think about this is wrong. We were never supposed to be able to do what most publishers and tech companies do today.
May. 7, 2020
New Firefox service will generate unique email aliases to enter in online forms Firefox Private Relay add-on to help users safeguard their email addresses from spammers. Browser maker Mozilla is working on a new service called Private Relay that generates unique aliases to hide a user’s email address from advertisers and spam operators when filling in online forms. The service entered testing last month and is currently in a closed beta, with a public beta currently scheduled for later this year, ZDNet has learned.
May. 6, 2020
In this blog post, Ian Levy explains how the new NHS COVID-19 app will help us fight the coronavirus while protecting your privacy and security (and not draining your phone battery).
Source: gov.uk
May. 4, 2020
Hundreds of people have been exposed for reporting people who have flouted social distancing rules and some are now scared they could receive a backlash. The names and addresses of approximately 900 people in Missouri were released as part of a media request under the Sunshine Law, which allows for the release of information submitted to a public agency (except for wrongdoing and abuse tips). St. Louis County had urged the community to share details of anyone not following guidelines in response to the coronavirus pandemic and noted in the terms and conditions that information may be shared publicly.
Apr. 11, 2020
Firefox users have recently started to notice that YouTube does not display videos properly when they enable the browser’s anti-fingerprinting technology for better privacy.
Source: bleepingcomputer.com
Mar. 15, 2020
For those who would like to opt out of Facebook tracking, the Facebook Container extension for the Firefox browser will block those embedded widgets on non-Facebook pages. And in doing so, Firefox helps you protect your browsing history and data from Facebook.
Source: mozilla.org
Feb. 24, 2020
‘The privacy issues are not fixable with regulation and there is no balance that can be struck,’ the Amazon employee said of Ring. The post was published Sunday by the advocacy group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and it was meant to protest the company’s external communications policy.
Source: businessinsider.nl
Feb. 21, 2020
Yodlee, the largest financial data broker in the U.S., sells data pulled from the bank and credit card transactions of tens of millions of Americans to investment and research firms, detailing where and when people shopped and how much they spent. The company claims that the data is anonymous, but a confidential Yodlee document obtained by Motherboard indicates individual users could be unmasked. The findings come as multiple Senators have urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Envestnet, which owns Yodlee, for selling Americans’ transaction information without their knowledge or consent, potentially violating the law.
Feb. 21, 2020
ISPs say that a law requiring users to opt-in to having their location and financial data sold is a ‘burdensome restriction’ on their ‘protected speech.’
Source: vice.com
Jan. 24, 2020
Rogue NYPD officers are using a sketchy facial-recognition software that it’s own facial recognition unit doesn’t want to touch because of concerns about security and potential for abuse, The Post has learned. Clearview AI, which has scraped millions of photos from social media and other public sources for its facial recognition program — earning a cease-and-desist order from Twitter — has been pitching itself to law enforcement organizations across the country, including to the NYPD. The department’s facial-recognition unit tried out the app in early 2019 as part of a complimentary 90-day trial but ultimately passed on it, citing a variety of concerns.
Jan. 23, 2020
Bezos hack connected to Khashoggi murder and the Washington Post’s subsequent media coverage. A timeline of events surrounding the Bezos phone hack Bezos hack connected to Khashoggi murder and the Washington Post’s subsequent media coverage.
Source: zdnet.com
Jan. 19, 2020
Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos. Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app.
Jan. 15, 2020
A new national campaign wants to stop facial recognition from invading U.S. college campuses. Over the years, facial recognition technology has appeared in a growing number of places, including weed dispensaries, retails stores, and even churches. Now, the activist group Fight for the Future has joined Students for Sensible Drug Policy to launch a national campaign aimed at banning facial recognition from college campuses across the United States.
Jul. 3, 2019
If you (like so many of us) hate listening to recordings of your own voice, you may be in for an unpleasant future, as Amazon has confirmed it hangs on to every conversation you’ve ever had with an Alexa-enabled device until or unless you specifically delete them. That confirmation comes as a response to a list of questions Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware) sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in May expressing ‘concerns’ about how Amazon uses and retains customers’ Alexa voice assistant data. Amazon’s response to Coons, as first reported by CNET, confirms that the company keeps your data as long as it wants unless you deliberately specify otherwise.
Jun. 8, 2019
When I was a boy, I secretly hoped I would discover latent within me some amazing superpower—say,X-ray vision or the ability to read people’s minds. Lots of kids have such dreams. But even my fertile young brain couldn’t imagine that one day I would help transform such superpowers into reality.
Nor could I conceive of the possibility that I would demonstrate these abilities to the president of the United States. And yet two decades later, that’s exactly what happened. There was, of course, no magic or science fiction involved, just new algorithms and clever engineering, using wireless technology that senses the reflections of radio waves emanating from a nearby transmitter.
May. 20, 2019
San Francisco, long one of the most tech-friendly and tech-savvy cities in the world, is now the first in the US to prohibit its government from using facial-recognition technology. The ban is part of a broader anti-surveillance ordinance that the city’s Board of Supervisors approved on Tuesday. The ordinance, which outlaws the use of facial-recognition technology by police and other government departments, could also spur other local governments to take similar action.