Privacy

EU regulators have proposed strict curbs on the use of facial recognition in public spaces, limiting the controversial technology to a small number of public-interest scenarios, according to new draft legislation seen by the Financial Times.

In a confidential 138-page document, officials said facial recognition systems infringed on individuals’ civil rights and therefore should only be used in scenarios in which they were deemed essential, for instance in the search for missing children and the policing of terrorist events.

The scraped data of over 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been put up for sale on a popular hacker forum.

The post's author has leaked two million records already as proof of the existence of the much larger data trove, as reported by Cybernews. The data, which is spread across four files, is said to include full names, email addresses, phone numbers, and information related to their place of work.

Stolen videos captured by tens of thousands of security cameras at private properties throughout China are now for sale across social media, marketed as sex tapes.

That’s according to the South China Morning Post, which reported that the cost of each “tape” varies, depending on how salacious the material is — nudity and sex acts can fetch around $8 a piece, while just watching someone in a hotel room might just run around $3, the paper said.

Russia has implemented a novel censorship method in an ongoing effort to silence Twitter. Instead of outright blocking the social media site, the country is using previously unseen techniques to slow traffic to a crawl and make the site all but unusable for people inside the country.

A user in a low level hacking forum on Saturday published the phone numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free online.

The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses.

Malaysia Airlines has suffered a data security "incident" that compromised personal information belonging to members of its frequent flyer programme, Enrich. The breach is purported to have occurred at some point during a period that spans almost a decade and involves a third-party IT service provider.

In science fiction, facial recognition technology is a hallmark of a dystopian society. The truth of how it was created, and how it's used today, is just as freaky.

In a new study, researchers conduct a historical survey of over 100 data sets used to train facial recognition systems compiled over the last 43 years. The broadest revelation is that, as the need for more data (i.e. photos) increased, researchers stopped bothering to ask for the consent of the people in the photos they used as data.

If your choice of encrypted messaging app is a toss-up between Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp, do not waste your time with anything but Signal. This isn't about which has cuter features, more bells and whistles or is most convenient to use -- this is about pure privacy. If that's what you're after, nothing beats Signal.

Since Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, users have wondered and worried about how much data would flow between the two platforms. Many of them experienced a rude awakening this week, as a new in-app notification raises awareness about a step WhatsApp actually took to share more with Facebook back in 2016.

New court documents show how police can use facial recognition tech on videos posted on social media platforms such as Twitter to track down suspects.

The Washington Post reported on a case Monday concerning a man present at Lafayette Square, Washington DC on June 1. On that day, police forcibly removed peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters using tear gas and rubber bullets ahead of President Trump arriving for a photo-op outside St. John's Church.