Privacy

Facial recognition software is everywhere. Facebook knows what you look like, even if your face is hidden in the photo. Google can spot you in childhood snapshots. Walk into a casino, bank, or high-end retailer and there’s a good chance that a security camera can identify you.

Jacob Burge illustrates the ubiquity of this technology in his series Face Off. “[These photos] are my way of representing our current image and surveillance society,” he writes in his artist’s statement, “a place where our identity is being digitized on a daily basis.”

Security researchers believe they have finally solved the mystery around how a sophisticated backdoor embedded in Juniper firewalls works. Juniper Networks, a tech giant that produces networking equipment used by an array of corporate and government systems, announced on Thursday that it had discovered two unauthorized backdoors in its firewalls, including one that allows the attackers to decrypt protected traffic passing through Juniper’s devices.

MAC USERS have been warned to be on the lookout after anti-malware maker MacKeeper exposed details of 13 million of its customers.

The leak was revealed by Chris Vickery, a noted security researcher, who posted details to Reddit over the weekend. The data was obtained by Vickery with no exploit or hack.

The next time a friend or family member asks you to install a gift-registry app, remember this: the app is almost certainly soaking up lots of your personal details. In the case of one such app from retailing giant Target, it's more than happy to make those details public. Witness the following:

According to researchers from security firm Avast, the database storing the names, e-mail addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, and wish lists of Target customers is available to anyone who figures out the app's publicly available programming interface.

The United Nations confirmed Thursday reports that activist group Anonymous leaked personal data from some 1,400 people using its climate website, as the world gathered in Paris to craft a climate rescue pact.

"I can confirm there was a hacking incident earlier this week and that has been handled by the conference's IT security experts," said UN climate secretariat spokesman Nick Nuttall, who declined to make any further comment.

Google has been collecting information about schoolchildren's browsing habits despite signing a pledge saying it was committed to their privacy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a complaint filed Tuesday.

The digital rights group said Google's use of the data, collected through its Google for Education program, puts the company in breach of Section 5 of the Federal Communications Act and asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate.

Toymaker VTech has admitted that millions of kiddies' online profiles were left exposed to hackers – much higher than the 220,000 first feared.

On Tuesday, the Hong Kong biz confessed in an updated FAQ page that it did not properly secure personal information on 4.8 million parents and 6.37 million children – including 1.2 million users of its KidConnect messaging service.

That admission comes four days after it emerged that a hacker had raided the entertainment company's customer database.

In response to a demand for backdoor access to its enterprise messaging products, BlackBerry is completely pulling out of the Pakistan market. The announcement comes as a ban on providing BlackBerry Enterprise Services over mobile networks in Pakistan was due to take effect today.

VTech, the hacked maker of electronic toys and apps that leaked the data of 4.8 million customers, including hundreds of thousands of children, exposed gigabytes worth of pictures and chat histories on the same compromised servers, according to an article published on Motherboard, the website that first broke news of the breach.

At midnight on Saturday, the National Security Agency ended one of its most notorious spying programs. This is only a tiny victory. The NSA’s sprawling, inefficient surveillance apparatus is still a privacy threat.