Privacy

Agreement has been reached on a proposed settlement of no fewer than 21 US federal TikTok privacy lawsuits in what has been described as one of the largest cases of its kind in history.

The lawsuits accused the company of “theft of private and personally identifiable data,” some of it from children as young as six years old. But despite the size of the settlement, you shouldn’t expect much of a payout if you’re one of the 89M US users…

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has argued that Apple Mail should block tracking pixels in emails. I agree 100%. This seems to me to be a much-needed feature that would be completely in line with Apple’s strong privacy stance.

For anyone not familiar with email tracking pixels, these are usually links to single-pixel images hidden inside HTML emails. They are usually either transparent, or part of an email graphic in the footer, so they are invisible to the user…

Following the launch of the new App Store privacy labels in December last year, Apple today published additional guidance for developers to better understand the information required for App Store privacy labels.

Looser privacy terms for WhatsApp, which led some users to seek alternative chat apps, will be enforced from May 15, says the company. Anyone who has not agreed to the new terms by that date will no longer be able to read or send messages, and face the prospect of their account being deleted altogether.

Separately, the invitation-only audio chat app Clubhouse has suffered a security breach that has seen audio feeds made available on a third-party website…

At the end of January, we saw a report from The Washington Post call attention to the recently launched app privacy labels for Apple’s App Store. The small-scale study showed more than half the third-party apps’ self-submitted privacy labels were completely false or at least misleading. Now the US House Committee on Energy & Commerce is urging Apple to “improve the validity of its App Privacy labels” along with asking for more specifics on the system.

Apple’s Fraudulent Website Warning is designed to alert you when you’re about to visit a website that is known to host malware, or that is believed to be a phishing site. Previously, that check consulted a database hosted on a Google server, but as of iOS 14.5 it instead uses an Apple proxy to better protect user privacy.

That adds an extra layer of privacy to the protection Apple was already employing …

Apple’s ad tracking transparency (ATT) feature is set to officially launch in “early spring.” And over the previous months, Facebook has been the biggest critic of the impending changes. Ahead of the new iOS privacy requirement, EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager has said it does look to line up with some of the proposed legislation in Europe but also gave a warning for Apple to play fair.

We’ve seen an increasingly heated Apple versus Facebook battle over the upcoming App Tracking Transparency feature, which will require apps to seek permission to capture data that can be used to deliver personalized ads.

Facebook has claimed that the change will hurt small businesses by making their ads much less effective. But a piece in the Harvard Business Review says that this is misleading …

Apple CEO Tim Cook opened the Computers, Privacy & Data Protection conference last week with a speech about privacy due to Data Privacy Day. After being broadcast live, the speech was uploaded today on Apple’s official YouTube channel.

The battle between Facebook and Apple over the upcoming iOS 14 ad tracking transparency (ATT) feature is ramping up. Starting today, Facebook will begin testing its own prompts asking users to allow app and website tracking. That comes ahead of Apple officially rolling the feature out in “early spring” that will give highlight what apps and websites are tracking them and the ability to easily opt-out.

There’s been a lot of attention drawn to App Store privacy labels since they went live in December. Apple made them mandatory for developers submitting new apps or updating new ones. Facebook Messenger came under particular fire for the sheer volume of data linked to users.

But spot-checks by the Washington Post found that more than half the apps they reviewed were either misleading or completely false …

Following Apple CEO Tim Cook giving remarks at the EU data protection conference CPDP this morning, the company’s senior director of global privacy Jane Horvath also partook in a roundtable discussion. Horvath was asked specific questions about Apple’s use of Google as the default search engine on iPhones and more.

Speaking at the EU data protection conference CPDP today, Tim Cook gave the opening keynote with his talk entitled “A path to empowering user choice and boosting user trust in advertising.” Cook covered Apple’s concerns about privacy and security in the technology industry, the hope it sees for change going forward, what it is doing to protect privacy, its deep concerns and consequences with Facebook’s business model, and much more.

In honor of Data Privacy Day on January 28, Apple has announced that its App Tracking Transparency feature will launch to users “in early spring.” The company has also launched a new easy-to-understand report dubbed “A Day in the Life of Your Data,” which illustrates “how companies track user data across websites and apps.”

A security researcher at Johns Hopkins University who led an examination into the robustness of smartphone encryption systems says he was shocked by the Android and iOS vulnerabilities they discovered.

He said that iOS in particular has extremely secure encryption capabilities, but these are not in use much of the time …

TikTok privacy protections for teenage users are being significantly enhanced, as the company belatedly responds to concerns that have been expressed ever since the app took off in the US.

The strongest protections apply to accounts held by those in the 13-15 year old range …

Facebook has offered tools to download your information and understand what details the platform has about your for a while now. But now amid more privacy pressure than ever, the company is launching a redesigned “Access Your Information” tool for iOS and Android to make it easier to view and download all these details.