Thursday, March 23, 2017
Senate Republicans Vote To Gut Internet Privacy Hamza Shaban, writing for BuzzFeed: The Senate voted Thursday to make it easier for internet service providers to share sensitive information about their customers, a first step in overturning landmark privacy rules that consumer advocates and …Wednesday, August 31, 2016
Dropbox employee’s password reuse led to theft of 60M+ user credentials Kate Conger, reporting at TechCrunch: Dropbox disclosed in 2012 that an employee’s password was acquired and used to access a document with email addresses, but did not disclose that passwords were also acquired in the theft. …Wednesday, August 24, 2016
Secret Cameras Record Baltimore’s Every Move From Above Pritchett had no idea that as he spoke, a small Cessna airplane equipped with a sophisticated array of cameras was circling Baltimore at roughly the same altitude as the massing clouds. The plane’s wide-angle cameras captured an area of …Thursday, November 19, 2015
Vizio TVs spy on you, here’s how to disable it Vizio’s technology works by analyzing snippets of the shows you’re watching, whether on traditional television or streaming Internet services such as Netflix. Vizio determines the date, time, channel of programs — as well as whether you watched …Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Dan Goodin reports over at Ars Technica on the development of technology which can use inaudible frequencies to tie together multiple unconnected devices. He explains: The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. …Thursday, August 13, 2015
Facial Recognition Software Moves From Overseas Wars to Local Police This is troubling: Lt. Scott Wahl, a spokesman for the 1,900-member San Diego Police Department, said the department does not require police officers to file a report when they use the facial recognition technology but do not make …Wednesday, August 12, 2015
The ethics of modern web ad-blocking Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and, more recently, Overcast: This won’t be a clean, easy transition. Blocking pop-ups was much more incisive: it was easy for legitimate publishers to avoid one narrowly-useful Javascript function to open new windows. But …Monday, August 3, 2015
Federal Court’s data breach decision shows new tilt toward victims, class-action lawsuits John Fontana writes at ZDNet: In an interesting twist, the Court said the fact Neiman Marcus offered free credit monitoring services was evidence that there was harm to these victims. The ruling turned …Wednesday, July 29, 2015
China-Tied Hackers That Hit U.S. Said to Breach United Airlines This is starting to look like a concerted effort to gather a specific data set for some sort of coordinated use: The previously unreported United breach raises the possibility that the hackers now have data on the movements of millions …Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Tor Project seeks Executive Director The Tor Project, makers of anonymizing browsing tools, is looking for a new Executive Director: The position provides the high-profile opportunity to assume the voice and face of Tor to the world, and particularly to the global community of Internet …Monday, July 6, 2015
When a Company Is Put Up for Sale, in Many Cases, Your Personal Data Is, Too I have written about this before, but it’s worth reminding you. These days many companies offer an official privacy policy and an easier-to-read but not so official abridged version. Sometimes the two do not agree: …Thursday, June 4, 2015
NASA, Verizon developing tech to track drones via cell towers Mark Harris reports at The Guardian: That $500,000 project is now underway at Nasa’s Ames Research Center in the heart of Silicon Valley. Nasa is planning the first tests of an air traffic control system for drones there this summer, …Friday, January 30, 2015
EFF Wins Battle Over Secret Legal Opinions on Government SpyingThe EFF said in a press release yesterday: The U.S. Department of Justice today filed a motion to dismiss its appeal of a ruling over legal opinions about Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the controversial provision of law relied on by …Friday, January 2, 2015
Message scanning lawsuit against Facebook won’t go awayJohn Timmer reports at Ars Technica: The court responded to this request by pursuing an extraordinarily rare course of action: it read Facebook’s entire terms of service. And, in this case, their vague language—typically used to provide …Friday, November 14, 2014
Americans’ Cellphones Targeted in Secret U.S. Spy ProgramDevlin Barrett reports at The Wall Street Journal: The program cuts out phone companies as an intermediary in searching for suspects. Rather than asking a company for cell-tower information to help locate a suspect, which law enforcement has …Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Subprime auto lenders use technology to compel paymentMichael Corkery And Jessica Silver-Greenberg, reporting at the New York Times DealBook blog: Ms. Bolender was three days behind on her monthly car payment. Her lender, C.A.G. Acceptance of Mesa, Ariz., remotely activated a device in her car’s …Friday, September 26, 2014
FBI Director dislikes encryption on Apple and Google devicesEncryption of data on mobile devices is a big selling point in our post-Snowden world. But FBI Director James Comes isn’t happy about it: What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place …Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Anonymous Instagram users role-play with stolen baby photosBlake Miller of Fast Company has this chilling article: Jenny had become a victim of a growing—and to many, alarming—new community that exists primarily on Instagram: baby role-players. Instagram users like Nikki steal images of babies and …Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Apple can’t bypass your iOS passcodeApple says in the latest revision of its page on government information requests: On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed …Friday, September 12, 2014
Privacy advocates, tech companies nudge Congress to protect ‘abandoned’ e-mailsThe Email Privacy Act would prevent the government from using mere administrative subpoenas to access email older than 180 days. The distinction, included in the Stored Communications Act , was based on the need for users …Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Facebook is not freeIf you use Facebook, this article is a must-read. It’s now common knowledge Facebook is always watching and analyzing how you use the service. But the breadth and depth of the company’s participation in the data brokering economy is staggering. The worst part? You literally …Sunday, July 6, 2014
For the NSA, we are the haystackBarton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani, reporting at the Washington Post: Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended …Friday, July 4, 2014
Facebook COO Sandberg apologizes for emotional contagion experimentR. Jai Krishna, reporting on the reaction of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to the outcry over the company’s experiment on the emotions of nearly 700,000 unwitting users: We take privacy and security at Facebook …Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Avoid Facebook’s all-seeing eyeViolet Blue, reporting at ZDNet: Facebook also announced Thursday it will begin tracking its users’ browsing and activities on websites and apps outside Facebook, starting within a few weeks Her article is full of great advice for people who want to minimize …Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Internet Privacy and What Happens When You Try to Opt OutJanet Vertesi tried to hide her pregnancy from the internet: The myth that users will “vote with their feet” is simply wrong if opting out comes at such a high price. With social, financial and even potentially legal repercussions involved, …Monday, May 5, 2014
When Facebook acquired fitness tracking app Moves, the two said user data would not be commingled. But Moves’ new privacy policy reverses course. First, when fitness tracking app Moves was acquired by Facebook in April, it said: For those of you that use the Moves app – the Moves experience will …Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Heartbleed: When no encryption is better than bad encryptionAlex Hern reports for The Guardian this disturbing fact about the recently disclosed OpenSSL bug, now two years old and pervasive: servers vulnerable to Heartbleed are less secure than they would be if they simply had no encryption at all. …Thursday, February 20, 2014
DHS wants to track license platesICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen, on the license plate tracking system recently proposed by the Department of Homeland Security: It is important to note that this database would be run by a commercial enterprise, and the data would be collected and stored by the …Thursday, January 2, 2014
Facebook scans messages for ad targetingI know this is an unpopular stance, but if you operate on any assumption other than that this happens all the time on myriad services you use, you’re a crazy unrealistic person lacking in the minimum amount of cynicism (read: realism) required to use the …Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Judges are, and aren’t, competent to rule on intelligence issuesLots to parse on this one, although it looks like a new chapter in the “Surveillance Wars” Edward Snowden started with his leaks. Two choice quotes really stood out to me in this article, though, especially because they are in …