Enlarge / Gabriel Weinberg, creator of DuckDuckGo. (credit: Washington Post | Getty Images) At the end of April, Apple’s introduction of App Tracking Transparency tools shook the advertising industry to its core. iPhone and iPad owners could now stop apps from tracking their behavior and using their data for personalized advertising. Since the new privacy controls […]
Enlarge / One hundred cardboard cutouts of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stand outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, April 10, 2018. (credit: Saul Loeb | Getty Images) Facebook’s senior executives interfered to allow US politicians and celebrities to post whatever they wanted on its social network despite pleas from employees to stop, […]
Enlarge (credit: Roy Rochlin | Getty Images) In 2018, Oakland enacted an innovative law giving citizens a voice in police use of surveillance technology. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called it “ the new gold standard in community control of police monitoring . ” Since then, about 20 other cities have adopted similar laws. Now, Brian […]
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto | Getty Images) Ireland is failing to apply the EU’s privacy laws to US Big Tech companies, with 98 percent of 164 significant complaints about privacy abuses still unresolved by its regulator. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Twitter all have their European headquarters in Dublin, making Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner the lead […]
Enlarge (credit: Stan Honda / Getty Images) WhatsApp has been fined €225 million for breaking the EU’s data privacy law by not telling its users how it was sharing their data with its parent company Facebook. In one of the biggest fines relating to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Irish data regulator applied […]
Enlarge / The Internet is unfortunately packed full of criminals seeking to steal sexual (or sexualizable) images from privately held cloud backup accounts. (credit: 1905HKN via Getty Images / Jim Salter ) The LA Times reported this week that Los Angeles man Hao Kuo “David” Chi pled guilty to four federal felonies related to his […]
Enlarge (credit: Jorg Greuel | Getty Images) More than a thousand web apps mistakenly exposed 38 million records on the open internet, including data from a number of Covid-19 contact tracing platforms, vaccination sign-ups, job application portals, and employee databases. The data included a range of sensitive information, from people’s phone numbers and home addresses […]
Enlarge (credit: Andriy Onufriyenko | Getty Images) Companies of all kinds use machine learning to analyze people’s desires, dislikes, or faces. Some researchers are now asking a different question: How can we make machines forget? A nascent area of computer science dubbed machine unlearning seeks ways to induce selective amnesia in artificial intelligence software. The […]
Enlarge / Pretty Good Phone Privacy wants to minimize how much your wireless provider knows about your location. (credit: Noam Galai | Getty Images) Location data sharing from wireless carriers has been a major privacy issue in recent years. Marketers, salespeople, and even bounty hunters were able to pay shadowy third-party companies to track where […]
Enlarge / This menacing firefox seems to be on the prowl for unwanted third-party cookies. (credit: Hung Chung Chih via Getty Images) Mozilla’s Firefox 91, released this morning, includes a new privacy management feature called Enhanced Cookie Clearing. The new feature allows users to manage all cookies and locally stored data generated by a particular […]