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’s privacy advertising feature that will now arrive in early 2021 has become a polarizing change. On one side, privacy advocates praise the upcoming default that will ask users if they’ll allow apps to track them and on the other side, third-party developers and advertisers say the move goes too far and will see ad revenue drop as much as 50%. Now Instagram’s CEO has weighed in and says the company will make a strong case against the change.
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The NSA mass surveillance program, which saw the National Security Agency collecting communication records of US citizens without warrant or probable cause, has again been found to be illegal by an appeals court …
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Apple came under considerable flack yesterday after announcing that it was delaying protections against one of the ad industry’s ways to track us. 9to5Mac readers and Twitter users were not impressed.
But ultimately Apple’s latest privacy step won’t make much difference: there’s already a new way for advertisers to track us, and there’s little Apple can do about it: device fingerprinting. Read on to find out how to test whether your devices can be uniquely identified …
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After announcing new iOS privacy requirements back at WWDC in June, Apple has shared a new detailed document for developers as they prepare to create privacy “nutrition labels” for apps. The new iOS 14 feature will apply for all apps that are available in Apple’s App Stores with the goal to better inform consumers with a clear overview of an app’s privacy practices.
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Overcast, favored by many of us as an alternative to Apple’s own Podcasts app, has begun providing podcast privacy alerts for shows in the latest beta version …
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Following Facebook’s multiple warnings including a recent public post about concerns over lost ad revenue due to the iOS 14 privacy changes, other digital publishers have shared similar fears. Like Facebook anticipating up to a 50% drop in revenue, one publisher estimates ad rates on iOS could fall as much as 40%.
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Analysis of the TikTok app revealed references to Chinese servers in the code, which was subsequently removed in an update.
Two security researchers have given very different perspectives on whether or not this raises any privacy concerns …
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A database breach has exposed profile data for nearly 235 million users of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
The data appears to have been collected by a practice known as web-scraping, where a company accesses the web interface of a service and then collates data automatically …
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IBM and the Los Angeles city attorney’s office have settled a privacy lawsuit brought after The Weather Channel app was found to be selling user location data without proper disclosure. The lawsuit was filed last year, at which point the app had 45 million active users.
IBM has changed the way that users are informed, and also agreed to donate $1M worth of technology to assist LA County with its coronavirus contact tracing efforts …
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The US Secret Service bought smartphone location data harvested from popular apps, says a new report today. The claim is backed by a contract revealed through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
The data was purchased from a data broker …
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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…