Items tagged with Privacy
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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Smartphones are inherently personal devices. We use them to help with and document so much of our lives. While data security is always a concern, the physical act of handing our phones over to be serviced can be particularly nerve-wracking. Sometimes the technician can perform the service in front of your watchful...
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Google announced its Privacy Sandbox initiative back in 2019 with the stated goal of changing the online advertising business that supports much of the web to use more privacy-preserving technologies. At present, online advertising relies heavily on third-party cookies that track users’ behavior across different...
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Near the end of 2020, Apple introduced a dedicated app privacy section to the App Store, requiring developers to disclose what user information is linked to users’ identities and used to track them. Then, in May of 2021, Google announced that a similar feature was in the works for its Play Store. Almost a year later...
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Ring, the smart home security company acquired by Amazon in 2018 for $1 billion, has a history of raising privacy concerns with its user data practices. Less than a year after Amazon completed its acquisition of Ring, an inside source revealed that the company’s employees had full access to customers’ live video...
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We recently wrote about TikTok’s extensive user data collection and an FCC commissioner's letter asking Apple and Google to ban the app from their app stores for violating their privacy policies. While TikTok goes to great lengths to collect user data, there is some small solace in the fact that users can avoid the...
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TikTok continues to be the subject of many discussions and news stories regarding not only privacy and personal data sovereignty, but also national security. Like so many popular social media and entertainment apps, TikTok collects lots of user data, including usage behavior, for advertising purposes. Detailed...
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Malicious software, commonly known as malware, is one of many threats to both cybersecurity and privacy. Cybercriminals can distribute malware to achieve a number of different goals, including siphoning funds from cryptocurrency wallets, stealing login credentials, or establishing botnets. However, cybercriminals...
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One of the perks of using Chrome is a wide assortment of browser extensions at your disposal. Including themes and apps, there are over 200,000 of them in the Chrome Web Store. There's strength in numbers but as it turns out, having so many extensions is also a weakness as it applies to privacy. How so? Your profile...
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Ransomware is bad news not only because it can cause business-ending disruptions, as in the case of Abraham Lincoln College, but also because the actors behind ransomware attacks often exfiltrate data from compromised systems in addition to encrypting the data on said machines. Ransomware gangs tend to use this stolen...
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Wi-Fi capable devices, like smart phones, often automatically send out probe requests in order to detect available Wi-Fi networks in the area. These probe requests include a device identifier known as a MAC address. Nowadays, most phones, as well as some other devices, utilize randomized MAC addresses to increase...
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Personal information is also valuable information, as personal data in the wrong hands can empower cybercriminals to commit identity theft and fraud. However, even those who take important steps to secure their personal information can have it exposed when an employer, health care provider, government agency, or other...
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The pursuit of internet privacy is something akin to an ever-evolving game of Whac-A-Mole, as new tracking techniques are revealed by researchers and addressed by privacy-preserving tools. Fortunately, there are a great many privacy tools available and under active development. DuckDuckGo offers a number of such...
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What a shocker—a social media giant misused its users’ data. It appears that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is not allowing at least one of those giants to entirely get away with its behavior. The FTC is fining Twitter $150 million USD for deceptively collecting users’ data and using it for targeted...
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