Privacy

Thousands of women in South Korea have protested spycam porn in the region—in which obscured cameras are installed to nonconsensually record women in intimate places—and now police are asking people to put camera protectors on their phones.

The Gyeonggi Bukbu Provincial Police Agency has created almost 50,000 camera protectors and are distributing the free covers in response to an increase in spycam porn-related crimes, according to a report from Korea Herald. This is part of its “Illegal Filming OFF” campaign.

A much-hyped dating site for Donald Trump supporters in the US is being blasted for shoddy security that may have exposed all of its users to eavesdropping and account theft.

Donald Daters pitches itself as "an American-based singles community connecting lovers, friends, and Trump supporters alike." The app, offered for both iOS and Android, was brought into the national spotlight on Monday when it was featured on Fox News.

The attackers who carried out the mass hack that Facebook disclosed two weeks ago obtained user account data belonging to as many as 30 million users, the social network said on Friday. Some of that data—including phone numbers, email addresses, birth dates, searches, location check-ins, and the types of devices used to access the site—came from private accounts or was supposed to be restricted only to friends.

At the Shiru Café close to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, students can get a cup of coffee without spending a dime. The currency here is information.

Students can get free coffee if they fill in an online form. They list personal details such as their names, phone numbers, and email addresses alongside less generic information about their program of study and their career ambitions.

New Zealand privacy activists have raised concerns over a new law that imposes a fine of up to NZ$5,000 (more than $3,200) for travelers—citizens and foreigners alike—who decline to unlock their digital devices when entering the country. (Presumably your phone would be seized anyway if it came to that.)

The Southern Pacific nation is believed to be the first in the world to impose such a law.

Google has made an important change to the way the Chrome browser works, a move the company did not advertise to its users in any way, and which has serious privacy repercussions.

According to several reports [ 1, 2, 3], starting with Chrome 69, whenever a Chrome user would access a Google-owned site, the browser would take that user's Google identity and log the user into the Chrome in-browser account system --also known as Sync.

Twitter is in full damage control mode after disclosing that it may have inappropriately exposed some unlucky twits' private tweets and direct messages to strangers.

The 280-character shoutfest admitted on Friday that a bug present in one of its APIs from May 2017 to September 10, 2018, could have caused some messages to leak to certain third-party programmers. The biz claimed less than one per cent of its users would be affected, but seeing as Twitter is used by roughly 340 million people a month, you do the math. (OK, perhaps as many as 3.4 million.)

Recent scandals surrounding how the world’s largest tech companies and social media platforms make use of the data they collect from consumers have led many people, myself among them, to investigate the devices and digital services they use without a second thought each day.

What I and many other folks around the world found was shocking: companies like Facebook, Apple and, perhaps above all others, Google, are collecting huge sums of data from us on a daily basis, even when we’re unaware of it.

Apple's new iPhones launch this week, and unlike last year, every one of the new devices comes equipped with the TrueDepth sensor array originally found in the iPhone X. Most consumers who are interested in Apple's products know that piece of technology drives Face ID (an authentication method by which you log into your phone just by showing it your face) and Animojis, those 3D animated characters in Messages that follow your facial expressions.

T-Mobile and AT&T customers’ account PINs — passcodes meant to protect mobile accounts from being hacked — have been exposed by two different security flaws, which were discovered by security researchers Phobia and Nicholas “Convict” Ceraolo.

Apple’s online store contained the security flaw that inadvertently exposed over 72 million T-Mobile customers’ account PINs. The website for Asurion, a phone insurance company, had a separate vulnerability that exposed the passcodes of Asurion’s AT&T customers.