Items tagged with Privacy
In recent years and months, personal privacy and security have become of utmost importance when it comes to choosing and using different platforms online. TikTok exists as something of an outlier on that front, but we digress. With this change and, ultimately, the publics’ pursuit of privacy, Google has announced...
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TikTok from Chinese megafirm ByteDance has turned short-form video into a social media phenomenon, making Twitter look pretty dumb for canning Vine a few years back. The skyrocketing popularity of TikTok has some security experts and political leaders concerned. As a Chinese company, the Chinese government has access...
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Yesterday, Apple announced a set of new security features coming soon to iPhones. Among these features is an option to enable end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for iCloud backups. US users are slated to be the first group for which this feature will be widely available, with Apple targeting the end of the year for its US...
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Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor turned mass surveillance whistleblower, officially became a Russian citizen in September of this year when Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a decree granting citizenship to Snowden and seventy-four other foreigners residing in the country. Last week, Snowden’s lawyer...
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The proliferation of “smart” devices within the home has raised privacy concerns as it has become more apparent that the companies selling these devices often have access to data and media collected by the devices. Eufy, a sub-brand of the popular Chinese electronics manufacturer Anker Innovations, tries to capitalize...
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Almost a year ago exactly, DuckDuckGo introduced a new App Tracking Protection feature for its Android browser app as part of the company’s plan to build an all-in-one privacy app that extends beyond just web browsing and search results. DuckDuckGo initially launched this new feature in closed beta, but, as of...
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Two iOS developers used a jailbroken iPhone to decrypt and analyze network traffic between the device and Apple. What the developers found is that many of Apple’s own apps frequently send detailed user behavior data along with unique device identifiers back to Apple even when analytics sharing, personalized ads, and...
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Advocate Aurora Health (AAH), a healthcare provider with locations in Illinois and Wisconsin, has published a data breach notice to its website. However, rather than being the victim of a ransomware attack or some other form of unauthorized access, AAH has instead attributed the incident to a bit of JavaScript...
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This week, the Northern District of California court is considering whether to let a lawsuit filed against Google continue as a class action lawsuit. The suit in question is seeking statutory damages on behalf of millions of Google Chrome users, claiming that Google misled users of Chrome’s Incognito mode into a false...
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Mullvad VPN, the Swedish VPN service that powers Mozilla VPN, is currently in the midst of a security audit of its Android app. While conducting this audit, the company discovered that Android’s VPN settings don’t block the operating system from making certain connections to Google servers outside the VPN tunnel...
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Back in 2018, the Associated Press (AP) published a piece bringing attention to the fact that Google still collects some user location data even when Location History is disabled in Google Account settings. Two years later, the Arizona Attorney General sued Google for deceptive location tracking practices, citing this...
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Last year, Cloudflare, a company that provides DDoS mitigation, content delivery network (CDN) services, and many others, published a blog post declaring its intention to kill CAPTCHAs. Now about a year and a half later, the company is introducing an alternative to standard CAPTCHAs that should be much faster and...
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Most wearable fitness trackers include the ability to track sleep, but what if you don't want to wear something on your wrist at night? Well, Amazon might have just the thing with its new Halo Rise. This device looks like a clock, but it contains a low-power sensor that can monitor and analyze your sleep, plus it...
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Edward Snowden has gained Russian citizenship nine years after fleeing the United States and landing in Russia. On Monday, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a decree granting citizenship to 75 foreigners residing in the country, with Snowden among them.
Snowden, a former NSA contractor, publicly exposed the...
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Among the many features and devices announced at the Google I/O event in May of this year was a new feature for the Google app giving users the option to request that their personal information be removed from Google search results. The company told users at the time of the announcement that the feature would be made...
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After introducing video end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for a subset of its wired doorbell and camera devices over a year ago, Ring has announced that it is now extending this capability to its wireless devices. While the company doesn’t specify in its announcement which of its battery-powered devices will support E2EE...
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Do you ever feel like company advertisers are doing more than listening to you? Let's face it, they probably are. You might be concerned to hear that your pocket smart device is also tracking where you are. This is not new information for most people. Many use GPS mapping apps, such as Google Maps, Waze, and Apple...
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We wrote last week about research showing that Meta takes advantage of the in-app browser feature on mobile devices to inject JavaScript into web pages viewed in the Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger mobile apps. Now that same researcher has found that the TikTok in-app browser injects JavaScript which functions...
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Internal moves and discussions at Apple may indicate that the company is moving to grow its advertising business. Apple already generates around $4 billion in ad revenue every year. However, according to Bloomberg, Apple’s vice president of the ad group, Todd Teresi, is pushing for a significant expansion of the...
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Facebook’s collection and sale of user data for advertising purposes took a huge hit when Apple introduced its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature, with Facebook projecting that it will lose out on $10 billion in revenue this year. However, it appears that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, may still have some...
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There is widespread concern over the amount of personal data siphoned off by Google, Facebook, and other big tech companies, but that's nothing compared to what your mobile carrier knows. A startup called Invisiv aims to address that with a new beta of its mobile data service. With Pretty Good Phone Privacy (PGPP)...
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Amazon published a press release this morning announcing that it has entered into a merger agreement with iRobot, the company best known for its Roomba line of robot vacuum cleaners. So long as the deal receives shareholder and regulatory approval, Amazon will acquire iRobot for a $61 per share, totaling approximately...
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