It’s been almost two weeks since people first took to the streets in Minneapolis to protest police brutality following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of the police. Since then, demonstrations have gained momentum and spread to cities across the US and world.
As countries around the world rush to build smartphone apps that can help track the spread of Covid-19, privacy advocates have cautioned that those systems could, if implemented badly, result in a dangerous mix of health data and digital surveillance. India's new contact tracing app may serve as a lesson in those privacy pitfalls: Security researchers say it could reveal the location of Covid-19 patients not only to government authorities but to any hacker clever enough to exploit its flaws.
Venture online nowadays, and your presence is immediately logged and tracked in all manner of ways. Sometimes this can be helpful—like when you want to see new movies similar to ones you've watched in the past—but very often it feels invasive and difficult to control.
Here we're going to show you how to cover some of those tracks, or not to leave any in the first place. This isn't quite the same as going completely invisible online, or encrypting every single thing you do. But it should help you sweep up most records of your online activity that you'd rather disappear.
The group video chat app Houseparty has spiked in popularity after millions of people around the world began practicing social isolation amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Houseparty touts a slew of unique, easy-to-use features that make group video calls more fun, but it also comes with a plethora of privacy concerns.
Comcast mistakenly published the names, phone numbers, and addresses of nearly 200,000 customers who paid monthly fees to make their numbers unlisted. The names and numbers were made available on Ecolisting, a directory run by Comcast, and picked up by third-party directories. After discovering the mistake, Comcast shut Ecolisting down, gave $100 credits to affected customers, and advised them that they can change their phone numbers at no charge.
This is similar to a mistake in the early 2010s that resulted in Comcast paying a $33 million settlement in 2015.
As cities incorporate digital technologies into their landscapes, they face the challenge of informing people of the many sensors, cameras, and other smart technologies that surround them. Few people have the patience to read through the lengthy privacy notice on a website or smartphone app. So how can a city let them know how they’re being monitored?
The European Union (EU) is planning to create a massive network of national police facial recognition databases, which could one day be linked to a US database.
The Intercept claims to have obtained an internal EU document from an unnamed European official, which indicates that the police forces of 10 EU member states are pushing for the bloc to introduce legislation asking all member states to create national facial recognition databases. All of those databases would eventually be linked with each other.
Last month, the cryptographer and coder known as Moxie Marlinspike was getting settled on an airplane when his seatmate, a midwestern-looking man in his 60s, asked for help. He couldn't figure out how to enable airplane mode on his aging Android phone. But when Marlinspike saw the screen, he wondered for a moment if he was being trolled: Among just a handful of apps installed on the phone was Signal.
There is no “justifiable basis” for Police Scotland to invest in and use live facial recognition (LFR) technology, a Scottish parliamentary committee has ruled, citing human rights and data protection concerns.
The Scottish Parliament’s Justice Sub-Committee on Policing said in a report published today (11 February) that Police Scotland would need to demonstrate the legal basis of its use of LFR, as well as eliminate the biases that discriminate against ethnic minorities and women, for use of the technology to be approved.
Avast, the multibillion-dollar Czech security company, doesn’t just make money from protecting its 400 million users’ information. It also profits in part because of sales of users’ Web browsing habits and has been doing so since at least 2013.
