The Indian government has sent a fierce letter to Facebook over its decision to update the privacy rules around its WhatsApp chat service, and asked the antisocial media giant to put a halt to the plans.In an email from the IT ministry to WhatsApp head Will Cathcart, provided to media outlets, the Indian government notes Read more about Indian government slams Facebook over WhatsApp ‘privacy’ update, wants its own Europe-style opt-out switch[…]

In the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved into a hotbed Read more about Every Deleted Parler Post, Many With Users’ Location Data, Has Been Archived. Parler goes down. Still can’t export your Whatsapp history.[…]

Since Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, users have wondered and worried about how much data would flow between the two platforms. Many of them experienced a rude awakening this week, as a new in-app notification raises awareness about a step WhatsApp actually took to share more with Facebook back in 2016. On Monday, WhatsApp updated Read more about WhatsApp Has Shared Your Data With Facebook since 2016, actually.[…]

With a nearly 80 percent uptake among the country’s population, Singapore’s TraceTogether app is one of the best examples of what a successful centralized contact tracing effort can look like as countries across the world struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic. To date, more than 4.2 million people in Singapore have download the app or Read more about Singapore police can access now data from the country’s contract tracing app[…]

Firefox 85, scheduled to be released next month, in January 2021, will ship with a feature named Network Partitioning as a new form of anti-tracking protection. The feature is based on “Client-Side Storage Partitioning,” a new standard currently being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Privacy Community Group. “Network Partitioning is highly technical, but Read more about Firefox to ship ‘network partitioning’ as a new anti-tracking defense[…]

This is a list of 130 Smart home gadgets, fitness trackers, toys and more, rated for their privacy & security. It’s a large list and shows you how basically anything by big tech is pretty creepy – anything by Amazon and Facebook is super creepy, Google pretty creepy, Apple only creepy. There are a few Read more about Mozilla *privacy not included tech buyers guide rated on creepy scale[…]

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[…]

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[…]

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[…]

Mozilla recently announced that they would be dismissing 250 people. That’s a quarter of their workforce so there are some deep cuts to their work too. The victims include: the MDN docs (those are the web standards docs everyone likes better than w3schools), the Rust compiler and even some cuts to Firefox development. Like most Read more about Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla’s top exec pay going up 400%[…]

Facebook has warned that it may pull out of Europe if the Irish data protection commissioner enforces a ban on sharing data with the US, after a landmark ruling by the European court of justice found in July that there were insufficient safeguards against snooping by US intelligence agencies. In a court filing in Dublin, Read more about Facebook says it may quit Europe over ban on sharing data with US[…]