We are surrounded by surveillance cameras that record us at every turn. But for the most part, while those cameras are watching us, no one is watching what those cameras observe or record because no one will pay for the armies of security guards that would be required for such a time-consuming and monotonous task.
There's a new battleground in the browser wars: user privacy. Firefox just made its Enhanced Tracking Protection a default feature, Apple continues to pile privacy-focused features into its Safari browser, and people are more aware than ever before of the sort of information they can reveal every time they set a digital footprint on the web.
If you want to push back against online tracking, you've got several options to pick from when choosing a default browser. These are the browsers that put user privacy high on the list of their priorities.
"There's nothing to worry about."
Every time I hear those words, I start worrying.
This may be because I've heard them uttered a little too often by tech CEOs who are subsequently shown to enjoy all the honesty of a congressperson's PR representative. I therefore well up with sympathy toward writer MacKenzie Fegan, who endured a troubling encounter last week with JetBlue's facial recognition technology, first introduced last year.
Naturally, she took to Twitter to register her troubles.
Sneezes and homophones – words that sound like other words – are tripping smart speakers into allowing strangers to hear recordings of your private conversations.
These strangers live an eerie existence, a little like the Stasi agent in the movie The Lives of Others. They're contracted to work for the device manufacturer – machine learning data analysts – and the snippets they hear were never intended for third-party consumption.
A wide-ranging criminal investigation involving eleven suspects has resulted in the reluctant disclosure of Stingray data by Canadian law enforcement. The Toronto PD and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police joined forces to deploy a surveillance dragnet that swept up thousands of innocent Canadians, as Kate Allen reports for the Toronto Star.
It’s Thursday afternoon, and I’m on the eighth floor of a nondescript building in the Flatiron District, sitting across from Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley. He pulls out his phone to show me an unreleased, nameless game that he and his skunkworks-style team Foursquare Labs have been working on. Think Candyland, but instead of fantasy locations like Lollipop Woods, the game’s virtual board includes place categories associated with New York City neighborhoods. There’s a Midtown Bar, a Downtown Movie Theatre, Brooklyn Coffeeshop, Uptown Park, and so on.
If you own a Nest Secure home security system, you should be forewarned the thing has a built-in microphone. There’s a chance, though, you didn’t know this when you bought it. Mostly because Google never told consumers its devices had such technology inside them. The company disclosed this information, inadvertently, earlier in February when it announced the systems would now work with Google Assistant, Business Insider reports.
Information about more than 14,000 HIV patients included in a Singapore health registry was exposed online, allegedly by a U.S. citizen whose partner was a Singapore doctor who had authority to access the data. The incident illustrates the importance of taking steps to safeguard the most sensitive patient information from leaks.
It’s often hard to tell just how seriously to take reports of a new vulnerability. The jargon is inscrutable, and the skills needed to pull off the attacks are possessed only by highly skilled professionals. But a bug afflicting Apple’s FaceTime chat has no such ambiguity. How bad is it? Rather than risk exposing people to it, Apple pulled the plug on FaceTime group chats altogether.
According to a new ruling issued last week by a federal magistrate in Oakland, California, the government can't get a warrant granting permission to turn up at a local house allegedly connected to a criminal suspect, seize all digital devices, and force anyone found at the house to use biometrics to try to unlock those devices.
