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.
Apple announced its upcoming single sign-on service “Sign in with Apple” at WWDC last week and it’s received quite a bit of attention, including concerns about a requirement to include the Apple offering if an app offers a login with a Google or Facebook option. Today, The Verge has shared an interview with Google’s product management director covering the company’s own SSO feature, how he feels about Apple’s entrance to the space, and more.
Apple of course prioritizes the privacy of customer data, but a new analysis takes a look at what Apple does and doesn’t know about you.
Apple pitches itself as the most privacy-minded of the big tech companies, and indeed it goes to great lengths to collect less data than its rivals. Nonetheless, the iPhone maker will still know plenty about you if you use many of its services …
When Apple announced a new ‘Sign in with Apple‘ button as part of iOS 13, the move was warmly welcomed by users, offering an option that combines convenience with privacy.
However, one requirement and one suggestion by Apple are raising eyebrows …
Another handy feature that is coming with iOS 13 is native support to help users deal with spam and unknown callers, thanks to Siri.
On the heels of a report from the WSJ last week about Apple planning to roll out more protections for kids’ apps on iOS, the company has detailed its latest steps to increase privacy and security for young users.
A new report today from The Wall Street Journal takes another look at the growing problem of how apps are sharing user data with third-party companies without user knowledge. While this happens on both iOS and Android, the report focuses on iPhone since Apple has strong beliefs about privacy. While the company hasn’t announced anything official, WSJ sources have said that Apple is going to tighten up app privacy soon, starting with kids’ apps.
While there’s now widespread consensus among tech giants on the need for a GDPR-style federal privacy law in the US, progress has been slow, and some are now concerned that Congress could be running out of time.
When Europe first implemented the gold-standard GDPR privacy law, Apple was one of the first companies to pledge to offer similar protections to its customers globally, not just to EU citizens …
Apple, Google, Microsoft and 44 other organisations and security experts have signed an open letter condemning a proposal to secretly add law enforcement organizations to encrypted chats and calls.
The proposal by GCHQ – Britain’s equivalent of the NSA – seeks to provide an encryption workaround that would breach privacy and security in apps like Messages, FaceTime, WhatsApp and Signal …
Monitoring software used by The Washington Post on an ordinary iPhone found that no fewer than 5,400 app trackers were sending data from the phone – in some cases including sensitive data like location and phone number.
It’s 3 a.m. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?
The stats are in for the first year of GDRP, Europe’s gold-standard data privacy law. GDPR fines totalled €56M, with more than 200,000 investigations, 64,000 of which were upheld.
However, the fines were dominated by a single case, with most ranging in the single-digit thousands …
Apple’s commitment to customer privacy includes extreme testing of Secure Enclave chips inside a top-secret lab, reveals a new report today.
The tests include ensuring that the chips remain secure even when subjected to extreme temperatures, whether low or high …
Multiple Snapchat employees spied on users by misusing internal tools, accessing such information as location, phone numbers and their own saved Snaps.
The tools are supposed to be used to help the company fight spam and abuse, and to comply with law enforcement requests, but many staff have access and are abusing it, say former employees …
Ad-tracking in Safari has been one of the trickier issues for Apple to address. On the one hand, Apple wants to protect the privacy of its customers. On the other, it recognizes that many of the websites they visit are funded by ads, and preventing tracking altogether makes free websites less viable.
The company does, though, think it has come up with a win-win for consumers and advertisers alike. Indeed, Apple thinks its solution is so good that it wants the World Wide Web Consortium to make it a new standard for all browsers …
The first anniversary of GDPR, Europe’s gold-standard privacy law, is later this week – and Microsoft has marked the occasion by backing Apple’s call for a US version.
Microsoft, like Apple, responded at the time by committing to offer GDPR-level protections to all its customers globally, but thinks voluntary moves by tech giants are not enough …
The scandal of US mobile carriers selling user location data was exposed earlier this year. The data was sold to a wide range of customers, ranging from banks wanting to reduce card fraud to bounty hunters tracking wanted criminals.
But the most worrying aspect of all was that carriers and bounty hunters alike were selling and re-selling location data to third-parties, with no controls over what then happened to it …
A range of studies have shown that popular games are sending data to multiple third-party entities, and even the developers concerned may not know what data is being sent to whom.
Angry Birds, for example, knowingly sends advertising data to 43 entities, but developer Rovio turned out to be unaware of additional data sent through third-party SDKs …
While there has been lots of talks about regulating Facebook and the tech industry as a whole, there’s so far been no real action. Now Facebook’s cofounder, Chris Hughes has published an opinion piece today in The New York Times, making the case for why Facebook needs to be broken up. But beyond that, he believes we need a new government agency to handle the growing tech regulation issues. Read on for the five main reasons Facebook’s cofounder believes the platform needs to be broken up.
There seems to be growing consensus on the need for a US federal privacy law along the lines of Europe’s GDPR. There is now bipartisan support in Congress, with Republicans and Democrats alike in favor of legislation.
They don’t, however, agree on the best way to go about it …
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has taken a side-swipe at Apple, suggesting that the company is effectively selling privacy as a luxury good.
Pichai doesn’t directly name the company, but the reference is clear …
Facebook privacy concerns continue as it’s revealed today that the social network has been using a team of contract workers to label status updates and photos with keywords, to help train AI systems to do the same thing.
As many as 260 external staff in India have been carrying out the work on content posted since 2014 …
Smart home devices are ‘creepy’ according to the majority of people who own them, based on an Ipsos MORI poll. Two-thirds of US owners of smart home gadgets bought them despite this feeling.
The take-away appears to be that consumers consider the convenience to outweigh privacy concerns …
A study has raised an interesting question: what should happen to our digital legacy: the data we leave behind after we die?
The question was prompted by the calculation that, before the end of the century, Facebook will have more dead users than living ones …
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) claims that US border officials are abusing the powers granted to them to search smartphones and laptops.
The ACLU was granted the right to review records and interview officials in order to pursue a lawsuit on behalf of eleven clients whose phones and laptops were searched when returning to the USA. Ten of the clients are US citizens, while the other has permanent resident status …