Privacy

Ashley Madison, an online dating website that specifically targets people looking to have an affair, has been hacked by a group that calls itself Impact Team. A cache of data has been released by the Impact Team, including user profiles, company financial records, and "other proprietary information." The company's CEO, Noel Bilderman, confirmed with KrebsOnSecurity that they had been hacked, but did not speak about the extent of the breach.

Facebook knows who you are even if you're not showing your face. Using artificial intelligence (just to make things extra dystopian), Facebook can identify and tag you by things like the way you stand, the type of clothing you wear, and your hair.

Facebook isn't putting the algorithm into practice yet, but its mere existence is worrisome to many, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the various people who have filed lawsuits over the years.

Thanks to the latest advances in computer vision, we now have machines that can pick you out of a line-up. But what if your face is hidden from view?

An experimental algorithm out of Facebook's artificial intelligence lab can recognise people in photographs even when it can't see their faces. Instead it looks for other unique characteristics like your hairdo, clothing, body shape and pose.

GCHQ'S SPYING on two international human rights groups was illegal, according to a ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) which is responsible for handling complaints against the intelligence services.

The court case was raised by a number of privacy groups and challenged how GCHQ surveys similar groups. It found that the government body operated in breach of its own rules.

Government officials have been vague in their testimony about the data breaches—there was apparently more than one—at the Office of Personnel Management. But on Thursday, officials from OPM, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of the Interior revealed new information that indicates at least two separate systems were compromised by attackers within OPM's and Interior's networks. The first was the Electronic Official Personnel Folder (eOPF) system, an entity hosted for OPM at the Department of the Interior's shared service data center.

Privacy-first search aggregator DuckDuckDuckGo has grown a whopping 600 percent since NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden began revealing the extent of the US spying apparatus.

The search engine uses sites including Wikipedia, Yandex, Yahoo!, Bing and Yummly and offers users bare-bones search results without the personalisation and tracking wizardry which powers Google.

Chief executive officer Gabriel Weinberg told CNBC it crunches some three billion searches a year.

Nine privacy groups plan to withdraw from U.S. government-hosted negotiations to develop voluntary facial-recognition privacy standards because the groups feel the process won’t lead to adequate privacy protections.

Industry representatives at the talks have been pushing to limit consumer control over the facial recognition data collected, the groups said in a letter to be released Tuesday.

Do you worry about privacy and security on your mobile phone? Don't!

After all, worrying won't help...but making informed decisions will. When it comes to mobile phone privacy and security, you need to ask yourself:

Identifying users who access Tor hidden services—websites that are only accessible inside the Tor anonymity network—is easier than de-anonymizing users who use Tor to access regular Internet websites.

Security researchers Filipo Valsorda and George Tankersley showed Friday at the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam why Tor connections to hidden services are more vulnerable to traffic correlation attacks.

British Airways is the latest high-profile company to fall victim to a large-scale hack. The company confirmed on Sunday that a security breach affected tens of thousands of its users' frequent-flyer accounts.

The UK-based airline told Mashable that users' personal data, such as travel history and credit card information, have not been viewed or stolen. However, British Airways has temporarily frozen affected accounts, and said some people may not be able to access their earned miles at this time.