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.
Just a few days after Congress reversed internet privacy rules enacted during the Obama administration, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon have all made statements claiming they will not sell personal web browsing histories.
Well, it’s official. Both the Senate and the House voted to overturn privacy rules created by the FCC, and your ISP will now be free to sell your Internet browsing history and location data to advertisers.
Internet service providers will have a few expenses to set off against this revenue stream – like the cost of donations to the politicians who voted to allow it.
But if you want to opt out, there’s still one way you can do so: use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) …
(note: specials.9to5toys.com has a variety of VPN offers starting at $10/year)
Last week, the US Senate voted to overturn Internet privacy rules that were introduced by the FCC last year. As we noted last week, the next step for the issue was to pass through Congress and today it did just that…
This joint resolution nullifies the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission entitled “Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services.”
The 2017 Corporate Accountability Index – a company ranking put together by a non-profit chaired by Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt – has ranked Google top dog in the technology sector, while Apple sits at #7 with a little over half Google’s score.
The US Senate has voted to overturn Internet privacy rules introduced last year by the FCC – and to prevent the FCC from passing any further such rules in the future.
Congress disapproves the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission relating to “Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services” (81 Fed. Reg. 87274 (December 2, 2016)), and such rule shall have no force or effect.
The issue will now face a second vote by the House of Representatives, and will become law if it is approved there …
Following reports that the Uber app appears to be tracking customer locations days or even weeks after their last ride, the company has issued an explanation. That statement also explains who some users were seeing the behavior while others weren’t.
The company says that it is not the app which is accessing location data, but rather the iOS Maps extension that some have chosen to activate …
We know Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg relies on good old-fashioned tape to disable his MacBook’s mic and camera, and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is working on something a little more sophisticated to stop your iPhone from snooping. It’s a protective case not aimed at preventing damage from drops and tumbles but instead spying and snooping…
[UPDATE: Video embedded below.]
Tim Cook featured at StartupFest this morning, in an interview with Neelie Kroes discussing Apple’s influence in startups and entrepreneurship culture. Cook covered many topics including the role of entrepreneurs and the App Store, the startup climate in Europe, economic optimism, technology in education, Apple Watch and more. We’ve included some snippets of the talk below …
In the interview, Tim Cook says Apple gives entrepreneurs the ability to sell their app instantly worldwide through the App Store. Apple provides technical and marketing assistance to clear the path so the developer can focus on their product. Most young companies should be principally focused on the product; Apple tries to help ease the frictions to fuel more entrepreneurs to do exactly that. Apple is bringing an app development center in Naples to kickstart the app economy in places it hasn’t yet been.
The fallout from the standoff between Apple and the FBI in the San Bernardino case continues. Following the introduction of one bipartisan bill in the House of Representives in February, seeking to protect encryption against any state-level legislation that might compromise it, a new bill has now been introduced in the Senate ,,,
Virtual Private Networks are becoming increasingly handy things to have, offering greater security on public Wi-Fi networks, making it harder for websites to track you and accessing content only available in particular countries. Usually you have to pay for these, but the latest developer version of the Opera for Mac has one built right into the browser, and it’s completely free to use.
Until now, most VPN services and proxy servers have been limited and based on a paid subscription. With a free, unlimited, native VPN that just works out-of-the-box and doesn’t require any subscription, Opera wants to make VPNs available to everyone.
If accessing content from other regions is your primary interest, the browser currently allows you to virtually travel to the USA, Canada and Germany, but more regions will follow once the feature makes it into the stable version.
Opera’s developer browser is a free download. Once installed, follow the instructions below to activate the feature.
Mac users just need to click the Opera menu, select “Preferences” and toggle the feature VPN on. A button will appear in the browser address field, from which the user can see and change location (more locations will appear later), check whether their IP is exposed and review statistics for their data used.
While the FBI abandoned its court case against Apple, the dispute of course still rumbles on in Congress, with hearings today and a proposed bill to force U.S. tech companies to break encrypted devices on demand. But at least one legal expert thinks the Feinstein-Burr bill is deeply flawed, arguing that it is unconstitutional, unenforceable and would harm U.S. investigative capabilities.
And not just any legal expert: you can’t really ask for better credentials in this area than those of Paul Rosenzweig.
Paul Rosenzweig is the founder of Red Branch Consulting PLLC, a homeland security consulting company [and] formerly served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy in the Department of Homeland Security. He is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute. He also serves as a Professorial Lecturer in Law at George Washington University [and] a Senior Editor of the Journal of National Security Law & Policy.
In a blog post on Lawfare, Rosenzweig sets out the three problems he sees with the Feinstein-Burr bill …
The FBI has so far been ambivalent about whether or not it will reveal to Apple the method used to access the San Bernardino iPhone, but a Reuters report suggests that the agency may not even know – or have the legal right to disclose it if it does.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that it was freelance hackers, and not Cellebrite, who sold the FBI the tool used to access the phone. But the group may not have revealed the vulnerability on which it was based, and the government process that decides which vulnerabilities to share with companies does not apply in this case …
The White House will not be supporting draft legislation that would allow courts to force tech companies like Apple to help law enforcement hack into encrypted devices, reports Reuters.
The Senate Intelligence Committee in February announced plans to impose criminal penalties on companies that fail to comply with court orders like the one challenged by Apple and finally withdrawn by the FBI. Remarks by President Obama last month appeared to suggest he would support the proposed legislation, but it now appears this isn’t the case …
Although the battle over encryption between the FBI and Apple has currently subsided, the issue of privacy and security in technology continues. Today, WhatsApp is announcing that all messages, photos, phone calls and videos sent over its messaging app will be encrypted end-to-end. This means that no one can access any communications apart from the people in the conversation. This means if WhatsApp is subpoenaed by government for information, WhatsApp will not be able to help them as it simply cannot help them.
See italicised updates below, with statements from both the Department of Justice and Apple.
The battle between the FBI and Apple over accessing a work phone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists started as headline news and ended in a rather anti-climactic fashion.
The high-profile congressional hearing was due to be followed by a big showdown in court. Instead, the FBI asked that the hearing be vacated, and later quietly announced that it had, with help, managed to gain access to the phone. Nothing to see here, move along.
But while this particular case may be settled, it’s extremely unlikely that this will be the end of the matter – for two reasons …
With Apple making very clear how strongly it feels about the privacy of customer data through the FBI case, it’s no surprise that the issue is a hot-button within the company. A Reuters piece shows just how serious Apple is when it comes to guarding personal data.
Any collection of Apple customer data requires sign-off from a committee of three “privacy czars” and a top executive, according to four former employees who worked on a variety of products that went through privacy vetting […] The trio of experts […] are both admired and feared.
One former employee said that debates over whether or not customer data can be used to improve a service usually take at least a month to settle, and some privacy issues are debated for more than a year before a final decision is reached. Key privacy issues are escalated all the way to Tim Cook.
It was a refusal to compromise on privacy that killed one of Apple’s products, says the piece, while others needed to be substantially reworked to achieve privacy sign-off …
A detailed behind-the-scenes look by Bloomberg at the showdown between Apple and the FBI details how it had been on the cards for years before the San Bernardino shootings. Among the details revealed are that Apple provided the FBI with early access to iOS 8 so that the agency could understand the impacts ahead of its introduction.
The government’s concern about Apple’s increasing use of strong encryption dates back to 2010, said one source.
Long before iOS 8 was launched, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies had fretted about Apple’s encryption, according to a person familiar with the matter. In 2010, the company introduced the video-calling app FaceTime. It encrypted conversations between users. The following year, the iMessage texting application arrived; it, too, featured encryption. While neither of these developments caused a public stir, the U.S. government was now aware how much of a premium Apple put on privacy.
It was around this time, says the piece, that the FBI started pushing the White House to introduce new legislation which would guarantee law enforcement access to data on smartphones and other devices. These attempts were reportedly abandoned when the Snowden revelations changed the public mood …
Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford and former special assistant to President Obama has written a blog post setting out the reason why she believes it is legally impossible for the FBI to win its case. The piece is entitled ‘The Law is Clear: The FBI Cannot Make Apple Rewrite its OS.’
While the FBI is relying on an extremely broad interpretation of the All Writs Act, Crawford points out that it is an accepted principle that specific laws take precedence over more general ones – and there is a specific law which outlaws what the FBI is asking for …
Fight for the Future, the protest group that organized demonstrations in support of Apple outside its retail stores, plans to hold a demonstration outside the next Apple/FBI court hearing on March 22nd. Re/code reports that the group has created a website inviting people to voice their support for secure iPhones, comments from which will be displayed outside the U.S. District Courthouse in Riverside, California.
The FBI wants to force Apple to weaken the security measures that keep all of us safe. This is misguided, and dangerous. On March 22, when Apple goes to court, we’ll display thousands of statements from Internet users outside the courthouse.
Fight for the Future has so far had mixed success with its protests …
We said yesterday that the war of words on the Apple/FBI dispute were hotting up, and Edward Snowden has now taken things a step further, suggesting that the FBI’s claims that they need Apple to access the iPhone are … not true. His comments were reported by The Intercept, which posted video of the discussion at a civil liberties conference.
“The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’” to unlock the phone, Snowden said during a discussion at Common Cause’s Blueprint for Democracy conference.
“Respectfully, that’s bullsh*t,” he said, over a video link from Moscow.
Snowden had earlier described how the FBI could physically extract the passcode from the iPhone chip, and has now linked to an explanation of how the agency could bypass the auto-erase feature …
While an earlier public poll showed the majority of the public siding with the FBI in the dispute over whether Apple should be forced to help the government break into an iPhone, the public mood appears to be shifting. A WSJ/NBC poll shows that, overall, American voters are now almost evenly split on the issue.
Neither the WSJ nor NBC has yet released the full poll – only the results relating to the Republican primary race – but CNET has reported the numbers.
Overall, American voters are evenly divided over whether Apple should cooperate with FBI efforts to crack open a terrorist’s iPhone.
47 percent said they feared the government wouldn’t go far enough in protecting national security, while 44 percent feared it would intrude too far into citizens’ privacy.
As you’d expect, there was a significant difference in views among registered Republicans and Democrats …
While most politicians have come down on the side of the FBI, Bloomberg reports Hillary Clinton is an exception. Not that she’s on Apple’s side: from her remarks, she doesn’t know whose side she’s on, she just wants there to be a solution but has no idea what it should be.
The implications of the FBI forcing Apple to create a compromised version of iOS to break into an iPhone could be profound, argues Lavabit – an encrypted email company that closed its service rather than comply with an FBI demand to hand over its encryption key. Company founder Ladar Levison (above) was found to be in contempt of court when he refused to hand over the key in 2013.
Lavabit is the latest of more than 40 companies and organizations to file an amicus brief in support of Apple, reports TechCrunch.
It warns that iPhone and iPad users may reject future iOS updates, which would leave security holes unplugged.
If the government is successful, however, many consumers may not be as trustful of these updates because of a fear (actual or imagined) that the updates will contain malware to provide a backdoor into the data on their iPhones. The result is that fewer people will automatically accept the automatic updates and the overall security of iPhones across the country will suffer.
But the effects of a ruling against Apple could go even further, the company suggests …
The battle between the FBI and Apple continues to be played out in the media. On the same day that Apple SVP Craig Federighi said that the FBI wanted to create a weakness that could be used by hackers and criminals, NYPD’s head of counter-terrorism weighed in during a radio interview. The Daily News quotes John Miller accusing Apple of providing aid to murderers, among other things.
I still don’t know what made [Apple] change their minds and decide to actually design a system that made them not able to aid the police. You are actually providing aid to the kidnappers, robbers and murderers.
He cited the same quote used by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance during the Congressional hearing to support this contention, that a criminal described iOS 8 as ‘a gift from God’ …