Items tagged with Privacy
A lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accuses AllState and its data analytics subsidiary Arity of illegally tracking drivers without their knowledge or consent, as well as collecting and selling location data. According to the lawsuit, AllState accomplished this through "secretly embedded software" in...
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Before you fill out that online job form in hopes of making some extra jingle for the holiday season, take heed of new warning by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). According to the FTC, there's been a "sharp spike" in online job scams that ask applicants to perform a set of fake tasks, which are designed to swindle...
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Mozilla’s Firefox web browser was the first to implement a Do Not Track option, and now appears to be the first browser to remove it. This option would send a website a request that a user didn’t wish to be tracked, although this was always voluntary. Unfortunately, “many sites do not respect this indication of a...
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Apple’s ability to design privacy conscious and secure technologies is being threatened as the company faces a $1.2B class action lawsuit. The plaintiff's lawyers claim that Apple isn’t doing enough to prevent the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on its platform. The lawsuit points to the company...
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Google appears to be working on giving billions of Gmail users a new way of fighting against spam. It seems the company is preparing a new way of creating temporary email addresses within a Gmail account, possibly called ‘Shielded Email’. And with Google in the process of deleting millions of inactive accounts, there...
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Take note of this company, Threshold: its new motion detection sensor kit is about to change not just the elderly caregiving world, but home security in general. For potential buyers who want to have real-time indoor motion detection minus the need for cameras or mics, the Threshold Motion just might the...
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When Microsoft kicked off the Copilot+ PC era earlier this year, one of the more highly touted features was Recall, which would create a searchable history of everything a user did on their PC. It was immediately torn apart by many security researchers and criticized by many users. This backlash led to the company...
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A nonprofit digital privacy group called NOYB, short for None Of Your Business, has formally issued a complaint against Mozilla with the Austrian data protection authority (DSB), urging it to investigate the browser maker's "Privacy Preserving Attribution" (PPA) feature in Firefox. According to NOYB, this feature is...
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For years the internet has been filled with stories about users that think someone is listening in on them, as ads appear to be eerily similar to things being discussed near thier devices. It’s an uncomfortable thought to suspect devices people rely on for modern life are just spies for companies looking to sell more...
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While some users may be jumping for joy over Microsoft’s Recall tool showing up as a removable Windows 11 feature, the tech giant says not to get too excited, as it is just a bug. The change was spotted last week in the latest 24H2 version of Windows 11, with Microsoft confirming a fix is coming.
When Recall, a...
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Pretty much any new car sold these days offers a connection to the internet in some form for fashion. This is to power smart capabilities, like onboard navigation and a plethora of other functions. However, some automakers are allegedly selling driver data to third parties at incredibly low prices, and it's not always...
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Social media platform X is now beginning to use data generated by its users to train Grok, the company’s AI search assistant. This update to its policy, which isn't the first policy change this year, was shared on the official X Safety account, where it says “all X users have the ability to control whether their...
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Google’s effort to end support for the use of cookies for user tracking in its Chrome web browser won’t be moving forward as the company originally planned. This initiative, dubbed Privacy Sandbox, has had several delays since it was announced several years ago. This decision comes after taking feedback from...
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Apple’s iPhone ads have touted the privacy features the company bakes into its products as a key differentiator between its devices and those of its competitors. This time around, though, the messaging is a lot more sinister. Its latest ad, dubbed ”Flock,” warns those who venture outside the walled garden of the...
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AT&T on Friday issued a notice saying it suffered a data breach that affects "nearly all" of its cellular customers (not to be confused with a separate AT&T data breach earlier this year). At last official count, AT&T said it serves around 109 million wireless subscribers, and given that most of those customers are...
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Whenever there is a data breach, there's a risk that the stolen data will find its way to the dark web, a section of the internet that is not indexed by search engines like Google Search and Microsoft Bing. Like a seedy alleyway, the dark web is a place where illicit transactions can (and do) take place. Stolen credit...
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Apple started its AI push in earnest at this year’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, where it announced it would provide several chatbot options alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Meta’s Llama won’t be one of them after the two companies discussed the matter briefly earlier...
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When the first batch of Copilot+ PCs release to retail next week (they're already up for preorder), they'll be missing a key AI feature that Microsoft remains bullish on—Recall, which aims to make it easier for users to retrace their steps by taking snapshots every five seconds. While the intent of this functionality...
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Microsoft is somewhat pulling in the reins on its Recall feature, which is a key part of the company's Copilot+ initiative for next-gen PCs (starting with Snapdragon X Elite/Plus systems). In theory, Recall is supposed to make life easier for users by helping to find things by continually taking snapshots of content...
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Adobe rankled creators this week when it prompted Photoshop users to agree to new terms of service. The mandatory policy included some troubling provisions about Adobe's supposed ownership of user content, and prompted fears that the work of creators would be fed into the company's AI models. Adobe has issued a...
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Apple released iOS 17.5.1 a few days ago to fix a problem where users were seeing old photos that were deleted show back up on their devices, causing plenty of privacy concerns among users online. Unfortunately, Apple’s only remarks for the update mentioned a fix for a “database corruption” without going deeper into...
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Contrary to what some may think, hackers can have scruples and, in some cases, honorable intentions—it's kind of the whole idea behind white hat hacking and events like Pwn2Own. But then there are the kind who wouldn't think twice about breaching a cancer center and swipe personal details of hundreds of thousands of...
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