privacy

The Washington Post reports that Facebook is facing their first U.S. lawsuit related to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Facebook is already in hot water overseas, but now the Attorney General of Washington D.C. is going after the social media giant. Meanwhile, Facebook has responded to...

The New York Times just published a scathing report on Facebook's data sharing practices. Citing over 60 interviews and "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times, generated in 2017 by the company's internal system for tracking partnerships," the publication claims...

AZCentral reports that a hacker broke into a man's Nest security camera at his Phoenix home. But, instead of abusing the system, the hacker contacted the camera's owner, informing him that the system was compromised with fairly obvious proof. If you aren't already paranoid about cameras in...

The Intercept initially broke the report claiming that Google was working on a censored Chinese search engine with the code name "Dragonfly," and now, the publication claims that work on the project has "effectively ended." The report says that the Dragonfly team mined data from the Chinese site...

On their developer website, Facebook revealed a bug in their Photo API that "may have affected people who used Facebook Login and granted permission to third-party apps to access their photos." Facebook claims some "third parties" may have had access to more photos than they were supposed to...

Todd Haselton of CNBC has written a guide on how to disable location services for apps to keep them from tracking your location. His guide covers the iPhone and Android ecosystems. For example, there are options in the menus to completely disable location services or to only enable it for...

The NY Times is reporting on mobile apps that track your movements after users agree to enable location services to get local news, weather, and other information. These apps collect data from a user every 2 seconds or up to 14,000 times a day for the purpose of selling the data to hedge funds...

While Facebook is reportedly "at war" with itself and the public, the BBC reports that Facebook is also fighting another kind of war. The social media giant is allegedly using a number of tricks to fool popular ad blocking plugins, including "breaking up the word 'sponsored,'" inserting hidden...

New Atlas reports that the Australian government recently passed the world's first anti-encryption bill. The Assistance and Access Bill 2018 can allegedly "compel a private company to create new interception capabilities so no communications data is completely inaccessible to the government."...

The UK Parliament published over 200 pages of internal Facebook emails they recently seized, and media outlets all over the world are picking through them. Among other things, the BBC points out the documents revealed that Netflix, Badoo, Lyft, and Airbnb all used Facebook friend data to...

Today's data leak of the day comes from... Bethesda. Recently, Bethesda promised to give buyers of Fallout 76's $200 Power Armor edition a real canvas bag. But to do that, customers had to create a support ticket and submit proof of purchase, which allegedly included a receipt containing credit...

Sleep Number added a few interesting lines to its privacy policy that detailed the audio data collection capabilities of its $3,000 beds. In fact these few spurious lines were indeed false as a company rep confirmed that the current lineup of Sleep Number beds do not have this capability. The...

The GCHQ, the hub of the UK's surveillance program, recently published a piece in Lawfare that calls for "virtual crocodile clips in today’s digital exchanges," among other things. While the agency isn't advocating weak encryption, they do want law enforcement to be a "third end" in end-to-end...

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Facebook considered directly selling API access to other companies between 2012 and 2014. According to TechCrunch, the WSJ's allegations come from sealed court documents from a lawsuit by app developer Six4Three. By all accounts, Facebook never...

A report by AP claims that automobiles from over 200 manufacturers transmit location data to the Chinese government. Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Mitsubishi, and NIO are among the manufacturers in the list, and AP says it generally "happens without car owners'...

An ElasticSearch server has reportedly leaked records of 56,934,021 U.S. citizens. The names, employers, job titles, email addresses, home addresses, IP addresses and phone numbers of these Americans were said to have been exposed exposed, and security expert Bob Diachenko claims that an...

Mirroring a similar protest by Amazon employees last month, Google employees have published an open letter on Medium protesting Google's censored search engine project for the Chinese government. The employees say many of them joined Google back when the company openly protested China's...

As we've reported before, this is a bad time to be Facebook. The company is under fire for a number of scandals around the world, and now, they're facing outrage from parliamentarians who intended to question Zuckerberg over the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Instead of getting Facebook's...

After uncovering some interesting court records, Motherboard wrote up an article on how law enforcement is using "network investigative techniques" to catch cybercriminals. In one particular case, attackers used a fake email address and a bit of social engineering to get a $82,000 check from...

The Guardian reports that the UK Parliament has seized a cache of documents "alleged to contain significant revelations about Facebook decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal." Parliament reportedly invoked a rare mechanism to "compel" Ted Kramer, the...

The use of body cameras on police officers is a controversial issue, but the technology behind the actual cameras doesn't get much press coverage. As in turns out, the leading maker of of police body cams, Axon Enterprise, has a lot in common with social media platforms and other businesses that...

In 2016, we reported that China was working on a "social credit score" system like something straight out of a dystopian novel. As it turns out, the Chinese weren't just blowing smoke, and have plans to implement it. According to a report posted by the Chinese government, which Bloomberg...

Google has created new, exciting patents to eavesdrop on your home environment. One patent will scan your home and identify items in your home. So if you have a shirt from a favorite artist in your closet, it will recommend tickets to see them live. It can scan your closet to learn your taste in...

Facebook apparently applied for a patent titled "Predicting Household Demographics Based on Image Data" in May 2017, and that patent just went public this month. True to its name, the patent suggests that Facebook intends to extrapolate relationships based on pictures posted to a user's page...

The BBC reports that a location tracking watch "worn by thousands of children" can be easily infiltrated by anyone with internet access. While the BBC report calls it "easy to hack", and is light on technical details, the security researcher's own words make it sound even worse. Ken Muro said...

Google recently bought DeepMind, an artificial intelligence firm that developed the healthcare app Streams. According to the company's blog, they want to turn the app into an "AI-powered assistant for nurses and doctors everywhere - combining the best algorithms with intuitive design, all backed...

Reviewers have had their hands on Facebook's Portal for some time, and the verdict is pretty much the same everywhere: Portal is one of the best video calling devices ever made. The Wall Street Journal calls it the "most immersive video-chatting experiences I've ever had," while CNET praises the...

In what Reuters claims to be "the first move of its kind," the French government will embed a number of regulators inside Facebook and "examine how the social media giant combats hate speech online." Starting in January, the regulators will stay there for 6 months. An official said that "The...

AP reports that a New Hampshire judge asked Amazon to release recordings made by an Amazon Echo smart speaker. While Amazon objected to these kinds of requests in 2016 and early 2017, Alexa data was apparently used in a murder case last year, but only after a suspect defendant consented to its...

It seems that the HealthCare.gov hack that we reported on earlier this month is more concerning that initially thought. A letter is being mailed out to citizens who have been affected by the hack. Name, date of birth, address, sex, and the last four digits of the Social Security number (SSN)...

Amid a number of recent security and privacy scandals, tech-related privacy issues are getting more attention than usual. Intel itself doesn't mine as much data as Google, Facebook, Amazon and others do, but they do sell the hardware to do it, hence they have a stake in the issue. Intel told...

GPUs are already being deployed to track people outside of Teslas and on the streets, but apparently, the algorithms those GPUs run are limited to relatively low resolutions of about 608x608 pixels. To keep up with improving camera technology, researchers have come up with a new algorithm that...

Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web, has been busy. In September, he announced plans for a distinct, decentralized web, and now he's unveiling plans for an internet "contract". The plan calls for a set of principles that governments, companies, and citizens should follow. Among other...

A report on Tech Xplore says that Chinese authorities have a new surveillance tool in their arsenal. The new software analyzes a person's body shape and gait to identify them, even if their faces are hidden from the surveillance camera. The system can reportedly identify people as far as 165...

Often politicians, researchers, corporate entities and citizens discuss the human toll of social media hacks and fierce debates ensue from those crimes, pertaining to what private account data is worth. Hackers in Russia have attached a price tag of 10 cents per account as they attempt to sell...

Computers could already catch lies back in 2012. But machine learning has come a long way since then, and now, the EU wants to use "AI" lie detector technology at border crossing points. The system developed by iBorderCtrl uses an virtual border guard to ask travelers questions, and AI to assess...

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office slapped Facebook with 500,000 pound fine for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which translates to about $641,000 USD. The office says "Between 2007 and 2014, Facebook processed the personal information of users unfairly by allowing application...

Apple has successfully blocked the "GrayKey" hack that allowed law enforcement and governments around the world unfettered access to passcodes on Apple devices running iOS. Devices running iOS 12 and above can only have metadata such as file structure and unencrypted files accessed by Grayshift...

Apple CEO Tim Cook's impassioned speech at a privacy conference in Brussels slammed data collection companies for committing surveillance on their users to fuel oppressive regimes and monetary gains from selling private user data. Tim Cook says, "We shouldn't sugarcoat the consequences. This is...

Researchers from RMIT University in Australia used data from social media platforms to predict crimes more accurately than existing models. The researchers used check-in data from Foursquare to generate a model of where potential victims will be, and then looked for areas where that routine...