Privacy

It seems as Google’s software, with the ability to listen everything being said in a room, was being installed on computers without the owners’ consent, and everyone’s freaking out about it.

It was first spotted by open-source developers who noticed that Chromium (open-source basis of Chrome) began remotely installing audio-snooping code that was capable of listening to users, The Guardian wrote in a report.

Uber has faced numerous complaints since its inception in 2010, including suggestions that drivers are not properly vetted. Now the taxi service is facing legal action over plans to track the location of its customers whether the app is running in the foreground or background on their phones.

The new policy is due to come into force on July 15, but the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a complaint with the FTC saying that the policy change is unfair and should be investigated by the commission. It will be possible to opt out of this location tracking, but EPIC feels this is unreasonable.

Out of the office on holiday this summer? Despite being encouraged to switch off, and enjoy a well-earned break, the reality is that many people find it difficult to "go dark" and so fall into the trap of checking emails by the pool.

So whether you’re travelling to a conference or a hitting the beach, you need to take appropriate steps to keep your data secure, particularly when browsing the internet or making online payments from your mobile device.

Just a few days ago the Electronic Frontier Foundation published its annual Who Has Your Back report looking at how various technology companies treated customer privacy. The report makes for interesting reading, but it also raises some questions. One question that has cropped up several times is "how the hell did Facebook get a rating of 4 out of 5!?"

As well as rating Mark Zuckerberg's social network in terms of its privacy policies and how it responds to government data request, the EFF also probes the hidden censorship that appears to be going on. There have been numerous examples of blatant censorship from Facebook -- including blocking certain pages in Turkey -- and while this is worrying (particularly when the social network's founder is looking to connect the world to the web with Internet.org) what is perhaps more concerning is the censorship we don't know about. The silent censorship that's going on the in the background.

Google is to start honouring requests to remove links to revenge porn from its search results. In a move that has echoes of the Right to Be Forgotten in Europe, today's announcement indicates that the search giant is now willing to start censoring search results if people request that explicit personal images of them be removed.

This is not supposed to be carte blanche for people to request the removal of any image they are unhappy with -- it is a move designed to target images that might be posted to sexploitation websites with a view to bribing their subjects.

For all those that say Edward Snowden’s leaks didn’t change public opinion on surveillance, "We’ve grown 600 percent since the surveillance revelations started two years ago", said DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg on CNBC.

DuckDuckGo, for those unfamiliar, is a search engine that does not track users. To make money, it simply allows advertisers to bid on keyword search like 'cars', 'insurance', similar to what Google did in the early days.

In the Electronic Frontier Foundation's annual Who Has Your Back report, Apple is commended for adopting a "strong stance" on user rights, transparency, and privacy. The 2015 edition of the report is the fifth to have been produced, and it rates a number of tech companies according to how they inform users about their privacy policies and how they respond to government requests for data.

Apple was awarded a full five star rating, faring better than Microsoft (three stars), Google (three stars), and Facebook (four stars). Other companies receiving a five out of five rating include Wikimedia, WordPress, and Yahoo. At the bottom of the heap are AT&T and WhatsApp who received just one star each. Despite a few disappointments, EFF is generally pleased with how tech firms have noted the renewed interest in privacy that now exists.

You might think that today's scammers spend most of their effort on the Internet, but a new report by call center authentication specialist Pindrop Security reveals that phone fraud is still big business.

More than 86.2 million calls per month to US consumers are down to scammers, and 36 million of those calls can be traced to one of the 25 most common phone scams. It also finds a 30 percent rise in enterprise attacks.

So, the unthinkable has happened for millions of LastPass customers worldwide: LastPass’s servers have been hacked, and user data stolen. The good news -- if it could be said to be good -- is that your passwords are almost certainly safe… For now.

Doing nothing shouldn’t be seen as an option, so what can you do to ensure your LastPass account remains as tightly sealed as can be?

As more wearable devices continue to enter into the market and into our lives, questions are being raised as to how vulnerable this may be making us when it comes to potential security and privacy risks.

Smartphones already have the capacity to hold a large quantity of data about us as individuals and wearable technology is likely to work in a similar way -- with fitness trackers able to store information about our health, for example, or the routes taken during exercise sessions.

UK secret services say that the encrypted files Edward Snowden held from his time working at the NSA have been accessed by intelligence agencies in China and Russia. The Sunday Times reports that the top secret files have been hacked meaning that British and American spies could be identified and located.

Wanted by US authorities, Snowden has been in hiding for some time now. It is believed that the time he spent seeking refuge in Hong Kong and Moscow may have given security official the opportunity to access the data he held. Although the data was protected, it is thought that the encryption was hacked, and US and UK intelligence services have been "forced to intervene and lift their agents from operations to prevent them from being identified and killed".

There is a movement calling for the encryption of all web traffic. The cause of this could be laid at Edward Snowden's door, but there's no getting away from the fact that in recent years there is an increased interest in security and privacy. To this end, Wikimedia has announced that it is now using HTTPS to encrypt all of its traffic -- including that to Wikipedia.

We've already seen the US government embrace HTTPS, and companies like Google and Facebook are making it easier to control privacy settings. Apple has hit out at companies that fail to do enough to protect users' privacy, and Wiki media is taking the extra step of also implementing HSTS, just days after Microsoft announced that this would be supported by Internet Explorer 11 under Windows 7 and 8.1.

Post-Snowden there is great interest in just what involvement the government has with technology firms. There are frequent requests from government agencies for information about users and the likes of Google, Snapchat, and even the NSA itself have all released transparency reports that reveal, in broad strokes, the number of requests for data they have received.

Amazon is the latest company to release a transparency report -- although the term really should be used in the loosest possible sense. The report includes scant details about the number of subpoenas, search warrants, court orders, and national security requests received in the first five months of 2015. The report is so vague as to be virtually meaningless.

Reddit is both famous and infamous. It's a source of news, a platform for disseminating such delights as the pictures that came out of the Fappening, and home to the ever-interesting Ask Me Anything sessions. But like any social website, it also has problems. Like Facebook, Twitter, and other sites, there are issues with spam, trolling, and abuse. Reddit has a particular problem with sections that are dedicated to harassing and abusing groups of people.

Now the site is fighting back. It is taking a proactive approach and removing subreddits whose raisons d'être are the harassment of people. The cull initially sees the removal of five offending subreddits, but the Reddit team explains that only one with a sizeable userbase is affected -- r/fatpeoplehate.

You don’t have to be following too many accounts on Twitter for it to become overwhelming; there is an incredible amount of data created every minute. To make things more manageable, lists make it possible to organize content into different categories so it can be quickly filtered. Today Twitter announces an extension of the lists concept that can be used to tackle spam and trolling.

It is now possible to not only create lists of accounts you would like to block (so you are invisible to them), but also share these block list with others. It's a technique that has already been implemented by some third party Twitter clients, but it is now officially supported. Privacy and abuse have long been issues for Twitter, and this is just the latest move to try to tackle the problem.