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.
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 …
The National Security Agency (NSA) has reportedly told the White House that it no longer sees its phone-surveillance program as worth the effort it requires.
It follows a report last month claiming that the NSA had in fact abandoned the program last year …
Update: Our sources suggest that, while there is no way to know for sure, it is possible that the developers are simply using app analytics services offered by Facebook and Google. That would see data being sent to servers owned by the respective companies, but wouldn’t make any of it available for advertising.
The American Medical Association (AMA) has found that most free apps designed to help people quit smoking, or cope with depression, are sharing data with Facebook or Google – and only a third of them properly disclosed that fact in privacy policies …
Two US senators have introduced the DETOUR Act, a bipartisan bill designed to ban apps and websites from using deceptive behavioral psychology tricks to obtain access to your personal data …
In the latest security gaffe for Facebook, millions of private records from the platform’s users have been found unprotected on Amazon’s cloud servers.
After releasing a humorous new promotional video about how Apple takes privacy seriously earlier this month, the company has shared another privacy ad highlighting how Safari limits cross-site tracking.
Facebook first started trialling a system to combat revenge porn late last year, but it had one rather scary aspect: you had to upload your own nudes so the platform knew which images it should block. The social network has today announced a new AI-based detection system …
Privacy has long been a value for Apple, hammered by Steve Jobs a decade ago and built-in to Apple’s software, something that can’t be said for many other tech companies. But marketing privacy as a product feature can be tricky. How do you show it?
Apple’s latest iPhone ad tackles that challenge head-on, connecting privacy to iPhone in the most relatable ways yet — like public bathroom etiquette.
Apple is one of a number of high-profile companies which had corporate data exposed through their Box accounts, an enterprise cloud storage service.
In all, cybersecurity firm Adversis found that data from more than 90 companies was exposed …