Fitness app PumpUp allegedly left a server that contained personal information like credit card numbers, private messages and health data unsecured.
The app lets you send photos to the PumpUp social network, to allow other users to cheer you on or suggest workout tips. It also tracks your fitness progress.
I don’t have an voice-activated assistant in my home.
Call me paranoid if you like, but I just don’t like the idea of some internet-enabled gadget always “listening” to what’s being said, waiting to hear if it’s being given a voice command. By my reckoning I’ve survived just fine for forty-cough years without a voice-activated assistant, so I’ll probably be just fine without one.
A little-known service has been leaking the real-time locations of US cell phone users to anyone who takes the time to exploit an easily spotted bug in a free trial feature, security news site KrebsOnSecurity reported Thursday.
At TheBestVPN, we generally advise against the use of free VPNs.
The reason is simple – many of them simply sell your data to 3rd party advertisers.
And this defeats the whole purpose of having a VPN in the first place.
But there’s more:
1. Many free VPN services are not transparent about how they make money from you using their services; in most cases, when you’re not being sold a product you are most likely the product.
2. Many free VPNs simply sell your data to affiliated/partnered companies or to the third party who is willing to pay the most.
You wouldn’t expect the organisers of a seminar on nuclear physics to hand out conference badges that were contaminated with dangerous levels of radioactivity.
You wouldn’t expect to attend a workplace health and safety training course in a conference centre where the fire exits had been padlocked shut.
In 2014, a researcher named Alexander Kogan created a personality quiz that 270,000 Facebook users would go on to install. From those downloads alone, he was able to harvest the personal information of up to 87 million people, according to Facebook's most recent estimate. He then passed that data along to Trump-affiliated political firm Cambridge Analytica, which would use it to target voters in the 2016 presidential election. Now Facebook has finally released a tool that lets you know whether you were affected.
The Chinese state is setting up a vast ranking system system that will monitor the behaviour of its enormous population, and rank them all based on their “social credit.”
The “social credit system,” first announced in 2014, aims to reinforce the idea that “keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful,” according to a government document.
The death of network neutrality and the loosening of regulations on how Internet providers handle customers' network traffic have raised many concerns over privacy. Internet providers (and others watching traffic as it passes over the Internet) have long had a tool that allows them to monitor individuals' Internet habits with ease: their Domain Name System (DNS) servers. And if they haven't been cashing in on that data already (or using it to change how you see the Internet), they likely soon will.
China's VPN ban came into effect on March 31, 2018, but virtual private network providers are still claiming their users have access to their services in the country.
China cracked down on the use of "unauthorised" VPNs throughout the course of 2017 with a campaign to take down and control censorship-thwarting software that attempts to break the country's surveillance and blocking lists.
Facebook now says the data firm Cambridge Analytica gained unauthorized access to up to 87 million users' data, mainly in the United States. This figure is far higher than the 50 million users that were previously reported.
Facebook's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer shared this figure at the end of a lengthy—and somewhat unrelated—blog post Wednesday that laid out a slew of changes Facebook is making to restrict access to user data.
