VICE has highlighted six reasons why Google Maps is the creepiest app on your phone. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: 1. Google Maps Wants Your Search History: Google’s “Web & App Activity” settings describe how the company collects data, such as user location, to create a faster and “more personalized” experience. Read more about Six Reasons Why Google Maps Is the Creepiest App On Your Phone[…]
As companies and governments increasingly hoover up our personal data, a common refrain to keep people from worrying is the claim that nothing can go wrong because the data itself is “anonymized” — or stripped of personal identifiers like social security numbers. But time and time again, studies have shown how this really is cold Read more about It Took Just 5 Minutes Of Movement Data To Identify ‘Anonymous’ VR Users[…]
President Donald Trump’s controversial use of social media is widely known and theories abound about its ulterior motives. New research published today in Nature Communications claims to provide the first evidence-based analysis demonstrating the US President’s Twitter account has been routinely deployed to divert attention away from a topic potentially harmful to his reputation, in Read more about Analysis of Trump’s tweets reveals systematic diversion of the media[…]
After many years of fierce resistance to open access, academic publishers have largely embraced — and extended — the idea, ensuring that their 35-40% profit margins live on. In the light of this subversion of the original hopes for open access, people have come up with other ways to provide free and frictionless access to Read more about To Prevent Free, Frictionless Access To Human Knowledge, Publishers Want Librarians To Be Afraid, Very Afraid[…]
This is not a drill. Red alert: The police surveillance center in Jackson, Mississippi, will be conducting a 45-day pilot program to live stream the Amazon Ring cameras of participating residents. Since Ring first made a splash in the private security camera market, we’ve been warning of its potential to undermine the civil liberties of its Read more about Police Will Pilot a Program to Live-Stream Amazon Ring Cameras[…]
The Brave web browser will soon block CNAME cloaking, a technique used by online marketers to defy privacy controls designed to prevent the use of third-party cookies. The browser security model makes a distinction between first-party domains – those being visited – and third-party domains – from the suppliers of things like image assets or Read more about Brave browser first to nix CNAME deception, the sneaky DNS trick used by marketers to duck privacy controls[…]
Philip Cooke, 55, oversaw eBay’s security operations in Europe and Asia and was a former police captain in Santa Clara, California. He pleaded guilty this week to conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses. Cooke, based in San Jose, was just one of seven employees, including one manager, accused of targeting a Read more about Another eBay exec pleads guilty after couple stalked, harassed for daring to criticize the internet tat bazaar – pig corpese involved[…]
Palo Alto Networks has threatened a startup with legal action after the smaller biz published a comparison review of one of its products. Israel-based Orca Security received a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer representing Palo Alto after Orca uploaded a series of online videos reviewing of one of Palo Alto’s products and compared it to Read more about Palo Alto Networks threatens to sue security startup for comparison review, says it breaks software EULA. 1 EULA? 2 WTF?[…]
“It’s finally happening: Twitch is taking action against copyrighted music — long a norm among streamers — in response to music industry pressure,” reports Kotaku. But the Verge reports “there’s some funny stuff going on here.” First, Twitch is telling streamers that some of their content has been identified as violating copyright and that instead Read more about Twitch Suddenly Mass-Deletes Thousands of Videos, Citing Music Copyright Claims – yes, copyright really doesn’t provide for innovation at all[…]
Oculus users, already fuming at Facebook chaining their VR headsets to their Facebook accounts, have been warned they could lose all their Oculus purchases and account information in future if they ever delete their profile on the social network. The rule is a further binding of the gaming company that Facebook bought in 2014 to Read more about Oculus owners forced on Facebook accounts, will have purchases be wiped, device bricked, if they ever leave FB. Who would have guessed?[…]
Google exempts its own websites from Chrome’s automatic data-scrubbing feature, allowing the ads giant to potentially track you even when you’ve told it not to. Programmer Jeff Johnson noticed the unusual behavior, and this month documented the issue with screenshots. In his assessment of the situation, he noted that if you set up Chrome, on Read more about When you tell Chrome to wipe private data about you, it spares two websites from the purge: Google.com, YouTube[…]
Never mind the Feds. American police forces routinely “circumvent most security features” in smartphones to extract mountains of personal information, according to a report that details the massive, ubiquitous cracking of devices by cops. Two years of public records requests by Upturn, a Washington DC non-profit, has revealed that every one of the United States’ Read more about Thought the FBI were the only ones able to unlock encrypted phones? Pretty much every US cop can get the job done – and does[…]
‘Technology ensures that we’re all served our own personalised news cycle. As a result, we only get to hear the opinions that correspond to our own. The result is polarisation’. Or so the oft-heard theory goes. But in practice, it seems this isn’t really true, or at least not for the average Dutch person. However, Read more about Do algorithms make us even more radical? Filter bubbles and echo chambers[…]
As if things were not going badly enough for the UK’s COVID-19 test and trace service, it now seems police will be able to access some test data, prompting fear that the disclosure could deter people who should have tests from coming forward. As revealed in the Health Service Journal (paywalled), Department for Health and Read more about UK test and trace data can be handed to police, reveals memorandum – that mission crept quickly[…]
The world’s plague-time video meeting tool of choice, Zoom, says it’s figured out how to do end-to-end encryption sufficiently well to offer users a tech preview. News of the trial comes after April 2020 awkwardness that followed the revelation that Zoom was fibbing about its service using end-to-end encryption. As we reported at the time, Read more about Remember when Zoom was rumbled for lousy crypto? Six months later it says end-to-end is ready – but it’s not[…]
Edge Chromium started out as a respectable alternative to Google Chrome on Windows, but it didn’t take long for Microsoft to turn it into a nuisance. To top it off, it looks like Edge is now a vector for installing (even more) Microsoft stuff on your PC—without you asking for it, of course. We don’t Read more about Your Edge Browser Installed Microsoft Office Without Asking. NO![…]
Members of the intelligence-sharing alliance Five Eyes, along with government representatives for Japan and India, have published a statement over the weekend calling on tech companies to come up with a solution for law enforcement to access end-to-end encrypted communications. The statement is the alliance’s latest effort to get tech companies to agree to encryption backdoors. Read more about Five Eyes governments, India, and Japan make new call for encryption backdoors – insist that democracy is an insecure police state[…]
one app developer revealed to Congress that it — just like WordPress — had been forced to monetize a largely free app. That developer testified that Apple had demanded in-app purchases (IAP), even though Apple had approved its app without them two years earlier — and that when the dev dared send an email to Read more about Apple made ProtonMail add in-app purchases, even though it had been free for years – this App store shakedown has a long scared list of victims[…]
There are few things as revealing as a person’s search history, and police typically need a warrant on a known suspect to demand that sensitive information. But a recently unsealed court document found that investigators can request such data in reverse order by asking Google to disclose everyone who searched a keyword rather than for Read more about Google is giving data to police based on search keywords: IPs of everyone who searched a certain thing. No warrant required.[…]
Facebook is using its vast legal muscle to silence one of its most prominent critics. The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group established last month in response to the tech giant’s failure to get its actual Oversight Board up and running before the presidential election, was forced offline on Wednesday night after Facebook wrote to Read more about Facebook Just Forced Its Most Powerful Critics Offline[…]
The UK’s privacy watchdog has wrapped up its probe into Cambridge Analytica, saying it found no hard evidence to support claims the controversial biz used data scrapped from people’s Facebook profiles to influence the Brexit referendum nor the US 2016 presidential election. There was no clear evidence of Russian involvement, either. However, the UK’s privacy Read more about UK privacy watchdog wraps up probe into Cambridge Analytica and… it was all a little bit overblown, no?[…]
Europe’s top court has delivered another slap-down to indiscriminate government mass surveillance regimes. In a ruling today the CJEU has made it clear that national security concerns do not exclude EU Member States from the need to comply with general principles of EU law such as proportionality and respect for fundamental rights to privacy, data Read more about Europe’s top court confirms no mass surveillance without limits[…]
The body tasked with oversight of the IRS announced in a letter that it will investigate the agency’s use of location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on peoples’ phones, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Motherboard. The move comes after Senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren demanded a formal investigation into Read more about The IRS Is Being Investigated for Using Bought Location Data Without a Warrant – Wait there’s a company called Venntel that sells this and that’s OK?[…]
Facebook Chief Revenue Officer David Fischer said Tuesday that the economic models that rely on personalized advertising are “under assault” as Apple readies a change that would limit the ability of Facebook and other companies to target ads and estimate how well they work. The change to Apple’s identifier for advertisers, or IDFA, will give Read more about Facebook revenue chief says ad-supported model is ‘under assault’ – boo hoo, turns out people like their privacy[…]
For years, you may recall that we would write about the insane nature of forum shopping for patent trolls, in which the trolls would flock to the federal courts in East Texas. Going back nearly 15 years, we wrote about how East Texas courts became grand central for patent troll cases, leading to all sorts Read more about Former Patent Litigator Becomes Federal Judge And Begins Advertising For Patent Trolls To Come To His Court (And They Have In Droves)[…]