The Meitu selfie horrorshow app going viral through Western audiences is a privacy nightmare, researchers say.
The app harvests information about the devices on which it runs, includes invasive advertising tracking features and is just badly coded. But worst of all, the free app appears to be phoning some to share personal data with its makers.
There is little doubt that the web is the greatest gift that any intelligence agency could have ever asked for. Security agencies and commercial entities can easily collect information about users. Every internet user is being monitored.
Thankfully, you’re still free to do as you like in the physical world, unencumbered by constant observation—right? Well, not for long.
Windows 10’s aggressive data-collection capabilities may concern users about corporate spying, but enterprises have control that consumer-edition Windows users do not: Administrators can decide how much information gets sent back to Microsoft.
But enterprises need to think twice before turning off Windows telemetry to increase corporate privacy. That’s because doing so can decrease the effectiveness of Windows 10’s security features.
Google is warning prominent journalists and professors that nation-sponsored hackers have recently targeted their accounts, according to reports delivered in the past 24 hours over social media.
Modern smartphones make it easy to back up all your data to the cloud so you can keep it synced across devices, or download it to a new phone. That can have unfortunate consequences, however—especially when phones are syncing sensitive information that users aren’t explicitly aware of, and then a company famous for developing smartphone cracking software finds out.
Seven years later, Shazam is still an amazing idea -- just press a button to know the name of the song that's currently playing. That's all well and good, but what if the music discovery tool keeps on listening, even when you turn it off?
On Monday, benevolent hacker Patrick Wardle revealed that -- on Mac computers -- the Shazam app never lets go of your laptop or desktop microphone. It continues to listen even after after you've told the app to stop listening.
Over two-thirds of schools installed special software on school computers to spy on their pupils, responses to Freedom of Information requests have revealed.
According to a report by Big Brother Watch, "classroom management software" is running on over 800,000 computers, laptops, and mobile phones found in 1,000 secondary schools across England and Wales. A whopping £2.5 million has been spent on the programs.
A new immersive experience for moviegoers is highlighting privacy concerns surrounding facial recognition technology that's being deployed by governments and the private sector.
"RIOT" by British filmmaker Karen Palmer simulates a protest scenario, employing facial recognition technologies to determine how a user would react in a real-world situation.
Dystopian corporate surveillance threats today come at us from all directions. Companies offer “always-on” devices that listen for our voice commands, and marketers follow us around the web to create personalized user profiles so they can (maybe) show us ads we’ll actually click. Now marketers have been experimenting with combining those web-based and audio approaches to track consumers in another disturbingly science fictional way: with audio signals your phone can hear, but you can’t.
As the future veers toward artificial intelligence, robotics, and biometric security measures ripped straight from a Sci-Fi novel, you might be amused to know plastic sunglasses are the key to their undoing.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a 3D-printed pair of sunglasses that cost all of 22 cents to manufacture. The sunglasses, according to an accompanying study, fools advanced facial recognition software by altering small bits of color information in a face.
