Privacy is a growing concern in today’s world. Follow along with all our coverage related to privacy, security, what Apple and other companies are doing to keep your information safe, and what steps you can take to keep your information private.
A security researcher has found that Instagram kept deleted photos and private messages for more than a year after he deleted them. The company paid him $6,000 for the discovery …
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Can police demand you unlock your phone if they want to examine it for evidence? Courts in different states have given different answers to this question, but New Jersey’s Supreme Court has ruled that the answer is yes. The court decided that a suspect can be forced to use his passcode to unlock his phone.
Despite the ruling coming from the state’s Supreme Court, however, that may not be the final, definitive answer …
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Some 278,531 Instacart customer records have reportedly been hacked, and are for sale on the dark web. The data includes names, email addresses, the last four digits of credit card numbers, and order histories …
There have been significant developments in the Twitter hack which saw the takeover of many high-profile accounts, among them Apple, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, Kayne West, Uber, Floyd Mayweather, Warren Buffett, and Barack Obama.
Twitter said yesterday that passwords were not compromised, but it subsequently locked all accounts where there was an attempted password change within the past 30 days …
Europe’s highest court has banned the mass transfer of personal data of EU citizens to US companies, due to mass surveillance carried out by the US government. The court struck down an arrangement known as the EU-US Privacy Shield …
Apple and Google should warn users about the ‘national security risks’ of apps developed by foreign entities, says the chairman of the congressional Subcommittee on National Security, Rep. Stephen Lynch.
Lynch has written to both tech giants arguing that apps by ‘our adversaries’ could be used to gather sensitive information on American citizens …
Amnesty International has lost a court battle against the iPhone spyware company NSO. The human rights organization wanted an Israeli court to block exports of spyware created by the company.
Amnesty had claimed that hackers spied on one of its staff using spyware tools produced by NSO …
Earlier this week, the White House suggested that it might declare TikTok a national security threat, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stating that the administration was ‘looking at’ the possibility of banning the video sharing app from the US.
Experts have now weighed in on the question, concluding that it’s not a direct threat, but might be an indirect one …
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo yesterday raised the prospect of a US TikTok ban over concerns that the popular app may share data with the Chinese government, and the chances of that happening may be increased by a new development today …
The US is considering banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News that the White House is ‘looking at’ the possibility.
Pompeo said that the US has already acted to protect its telecoms infrastructure, and wanted to make the right decision when it came to smartphones …
After WhatsApp and Telegram promised that they will not, for now, hand over any user data to local authorities, Apple has said that it is assessing its own Hong Kong policy.
The Cupertino company said that it already has one protection in place …
Both WhatsApp and Telegram have announced that they will not – for now, at least – hand over user data to Hong Kong authorities even when sent official demands to do so. The move follows China introducing a new ‘national security’ law which bans criticism of the Chinese government.
Hong Kong residents who have been critical of China fear that their social media posts and messages might now be used as a basis for arrest and imprisonment …
Apple and the ad industry are once again in conflict, as ad associations object to the way iOS 14 seeks user permission for tracking.
It’s not the first time this has happened – Apple’s adoption of Intelligent Tracking Prevention led to criticism by the ad industry back in 2018 …
California is today starting to enforce its digital privacy law, six months after it went into effect. It has been described as the toughest privacy law in the US, having been partly modelled on Europe’s gold-standard GDPR law…
Shopping list and recipe app AnyList has explained in a lengthy blog post no fewer than ten problems with Sign in with Apple.
It says there are five problems for users, and five for developers, and consequently the app will not be supporting the login method …
The Indiana Supreme court has ruled that a suspect cannot be forced to unlock her iPhone using her passcode, rejecting a legal argument known as ‘foregone conclusion.’
While the argument used against her does have legal precedent, the use of it to compel disclosure of a passcode does seem absurd …
A group of Republican senators are making yet another attempt to ban end-to-end encryption in messaging services, which would make illegal Apple’s Messages and FaceTime services, as well as a wide range of other message apps like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram.
No surprise, either, that they are again demonstrating that they don’t understand how end-to-end encryption works …
Update: The app is now available to all. The company also announced two additional new features for home users, and two others for work users, described at the end of the piece.
A Dropbox password manager has been quietly added to the App Store, but it is currently listed as ‘by invite.’ This means that you can download it, but can’t yet activate it. An Android version is also available on the Play store, subject to the same restriction …
New York attorney general Letitia James has asked Apple and Google to vet contact tracing apps submitted to their app stores to distinguish official from unofficial ones, and to ensure that they protect user privacy.
Apple has already taken one step in this direction, but New York wants the company to go further …
Anonymizing photos and videos can be a time-consuming task sometimes including multiple steps, especially if you want to strip metadata. Developers Playground.AI decided to tackle that problem and came up with a valuable new iPhone app called Anonymous Camera that handles all of the processing on device in real-time. Playground.AI is also donating all of its proceeds from the app to Black Visions Collective and Unicorn Riot for the first month.
The FBI broke the law when it switched on a suspect’s phone to look at his lock screen without a warrant, ruled a judge.
It said that gathering evidence from a lock screen constitutes a search, and doing this without a warrant violates the 4th Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure …
Apple and Google created a coronavirus contact tracing API to help governments create their own apps – but an initial report suggests that take-up hasn’t been high. Just 22 countries and a handful of US states have so far requested access, and a subsequent iOS and Android update to allow contact tracing to work without an app appears to be some months away.
Some countries have created contact tracing apps that involve huge infringements of privacy. The one used in South Korea, for example, collects surname, sex, year of birth, residential district, profession, travel history, and more. China’s app is linked to a unique government ID, identifying specific individuals.
Many countries still haven’t managed to release a contact tracing app at all …
Analysis of the source code for the UK contact tracing app has revealed no fewer than seven security flaws.
One of these is that the random code assigned to users is only changed once a day, making it much easier to de-anonymize individuals …
A previously undisclosed Grayshift tool allows law enforcement agencies to capture an iPhone passcode when the owner uses it to unlock their phone. This is done by surreptitiously installing malware on the device before handing it back to the suspect.
We knew Grayshift’s GrayKey box could brute-force iPhone passcodes, but we’re learning for the first time about this additional capability, which has seemingly been available for at least a year …