Items tagged with Privacy
Microsoft will be retiring Internet Explorer once and for all on June 15. However, Microsoft won’t be out of the web browser game with this retirement. The company has shifted its focus to maintaining and developing the Chromium-based Edge browser. Microsoft rolls out new Edge features fairly often, though some of...
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Back in May of 2021, Google announced that privacy labels would be coming to the Google Play Store. Now, almost a year later, the company has announced that it will soon be rolling these labels out to the Play Store with requirements for application developers. The Google Play Store already features an expandable...
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There are a number of underground online marketplaces where stolen user data is illegally bought and sold by cybercriminals. Government authorities recently seized and shutdown RaidForums, one of the most notable hubs for such illicit transactions. Meanwhile, there is an entire aboveground industry that specializes in...
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Google is about to slam the ban hammer on third-party apps currently in the Play Store that use the Accessibility API for recording calls. The move will make it more difficult to record calls on an Android device.
While the latest Pixel smartphones offer the ability to record phone calls through its pre-installed...
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Back in 2015, Google introduced its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project as an effort to speed up mobile web browsing. AMP uses special web components to load alternate versions of webpages on Google servers, rather than serving webpages from the servers of the corresponding website. AMP webpages first appeared in...
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If you use Cash App, some of your personal details may have been exposed. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Cash App developer Block (formerly Square) revealed it suffered a data breach last December in which a former employee downloaded financial reports for millions of US...
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It looks like Android devices will soon receive a highly requested privacy feature. The Google Android app has long permitted users to auto-delete or manually delete their search history, but the provided time range has always been rather limited. Android users will now be able delete the last 15 minutes of their...
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Last week, we covered warnings issued by two U.S. state attorneys general alerting citizens to the potential stalking threat posed by Apple AirTags. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro stated that “In the wrong hands, these tracking devices could lead to disaster.” These warnings came a week after Apple...
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Since their release, we have been covering the privacy and safety concerns surrounding Apple AirTags. AirTags are cheap and easy-to-use tracking devices that make use of Apple’s billion device Find My network. AirTags are intended to be used for keeping track of and recovering personal belongings, but concerns have...
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Unlike Vegas, what happens on your smartphone may not always stay on your smartphone. App tracking is key to the booming advertising business, and it's why your online habits tend to manifest in ads targeted to your interest. That business model isn't going away entirely, but it is evolving with Apple and now Google...
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Since it’s meteoric rise in early 2020, Zoom has repeatedly come under fire, whether for playing fast and loose with the definition of end-to-end encryption, sharing user data with Facebook undisclosed, installing a hidden web server on customers’ Macs, publishing then back-tracking a claim of 300 million daily active...
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Apple’s AirTag tracking device has garnered a bit of negative attention since its release as privacy and safety concerns have arisen. The device is intended to be attached to personal belongings that are liable to be lost, so that their rightful owners may find them again. Apple claims that it has received written...
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Apple has fessed up to a bug introduced in iOS 15 that, for some iPhone users, was not respecting their wishes to opt out of sharing voice recordings to strengthen Siri, the built-in digital assistant. Fortunately this privacy bug was stomped out with the release of iOS 15.2, so be sure your iPhone is updated (the...
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Most would argue that privacy features are good for users, but media platforms have a different perspective. Facebook claims that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature will cost it $10 billion in revenue this year. Meta CFO Dave Wehner remarked the loss in revenue the company expects to see in 2022 is based on...
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Practically anything and everything can be accomplished online these days, and that obviously includes applying for a job. As it relates to that, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) posted a notice warning that scammers are preying on job applicants resulting in an average loss of $3,000 per victim, as well as...
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Back in 2018, a team of security researchers from Akamai released a white paper detailing a malicious proxy system they dubbed UPnProxy that is now being leveraged in a new attack. The malicious proxy system draws its name from Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), which is a set of networking protocols that enables devices...
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Many websites and applications employ various device fingerprinting methods to identify users and track their activity across websites and applications over time. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good explainer on this subject, as well as a tool to test how well your browser protects you from fingerprinting...
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Remember what life was like before the advent of social media? Such a time feels like ancient history, and many people these days juggle multiple social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a host of others. They're all super popular, and so it's no surprise that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)...
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After more than a year of testing, Google is abandoning plans to replace support for third-party tracking cookies with the "Federated Learning of Cohorts," otherwise known as FLoC, basically an algorithm that sorts people into groups with others who have similar browsing habits. Google isn't embracing third-party...
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WhatsApp users may soon be able to migrate their chat history from an Android phone to an iPhone. Incidentally, the chat migration feature is already available for users moving their chat histories from iPhone to Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones.
When it comes to messaging apps, WhatsApp is one of the most...
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End-to-end Encryption for most people this is something invisible they never even think about, but for just about everyone who uses messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal and many others, this is an absolute necessity for privacy.
In a recent report by Rolling Stone it was revealed that the UK...
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In another example of social engineering’, an unpatchable bug has been discovered in iOS. This ultimate persistence bug makes you think your iPhone has been shut down when it hasn’t. Once in effect, it’s a trivial matter for nefarious individuals to activate your iPhone’s camera and microphone to spy on you.
The...
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