US Amazon customers have a week to opt out of Sidewalk -- here's why you should
You've probably heard of Amazon Sidewalk, the company's home networking system. In fact Sidewalk is a bit more than that, it involves devices like Echo speakers and Ring doorbells becoming part of 'mesh networks'.
These networks will, says Amazon, simplify the process of setting up new devices, keep them online even when out of range of home Wi-Fi, and extend the range of tracking devices. However, customers have only a week to opt out if they don't want their devices to be enrolled in Sidewalk.
New identity platform delivers biometric authentication and enterprise-grade tools
Verification and authentication provider Onfido is launching its Real Identity Platform, which adds a biometric face authenticator as well as new enterprise-grade security tools, including Onfido Private Key Encryption, to its existing identity verification suite.
Onfido Face Authenticate uses 3D Face Liveness Detection AI during user authentication. It's compatible with billions of iOS and Android devices, tablets and PCs.
Who will scrutinize the scrapers?
Web scraping allows the collection of data from third-party web sources. Data harvesting like this is one of the key pillars of the internet, but while it can be useful it also has the potential for harm.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2016 first brought this type of activity to the wider public's attention but, as of today, there is still no regulatory body to govern its widespread use.
New app helps manage employee photo usage rights
Ensuring consent for the use of digital assets can be a bit of a nightmare. But a new solution from FotoWare ensures that employee photos are only used with the full consent of the subject, freeing content creators and managers who can quickly review, and refresh consents if usage changes.
FotoWare's Consent Management offers mobile and email based signature collection, along with searching and filtering media based on consent status.
32 percent of Americans are unaware of email tracking
A new survey from email service OnMail reveals that 93 percent of Americans think it's important that companies don't track their email, however, 32 percent don't know that leading email providers do it for advertising purposes.
Interestingly this view is remarkably consistent across age groups with 93 percent or more across all groups believing it's important that businesses don’t track the types of email you open.
Audacity bows to public pressure and says it will NOT collect telemetry data from users
Perceived invasions of privacy never go down well, as many software developers have discovered. Microsoft has received quite a backlash in response to telemetry in Windows 10, and the recent announcement that the audio editor Audacity was planning to do the same prompted a fierce reaction from users.
Audacity's new owner, Muse Group, has bowed to pressure from users and privacy advocates, announcing that the planned telemetry collection will no longer be going ahead. The company is blaming "communication mistakes" and public "misunderstanding" for the negative response to its previous data collection announcement.
Beyond Identity looks to a passwordless future
The death of the password has been predicted for a long time, yet it remains the most common way of logging into systems.
Identity management company Beyond Identity is looking to solve what is one of the biggest challenges in IT security and aims to re-establish trust in authentication chains by finally eliminating passwords as the weakest link.
Virtual room technology delivers secure customer interactions for the finance sector
One of the problems the finance and banking sector has had during the pandemic has been reduced branch access and the inability to hold face-to-face meetings.
Identity specialist OneSpan has introduced a technology called Virtual Room. Using this, financial institutions and their customers can digitally review and sign documents together without having to combine multiple tools and apps.
The normalization of data leaks and the privacy paradox [Q&A]
Is society becoming too accepting of data breaches? Do we claim to want more privacy but then continue to treat our own data in a cavalier fashion?
A recently leaked internal memo from Facebook revealed the company's plans to normalize data scraping leaks and change the way the public views these incidents.
Audio editor Audacity has the audacity to add telemetry collection -- and users are not happy
Whatever the reasons behind it, the inclusion of telemetry collection in software never goes down well -- as Microsoft knows all too well from the reaction to Windows 10 telemetry. Now, open-source audio editor Audacity has taken the decision to add such data capture into the software.
The development team stresses that telemetry exists solely to "identify product issues early", but there has already been quite a backlash. The sharing of data with Google and Yandex has not gone well.
New platform offers safe, self-service data sharing
In order to get the best value from data it's important that it's accessible to the right people in the business at the time they need it.
Data privacy specialist Privitar is announcing a new data provisioning platform that makes self-service data available safely, at scale, to the people who need it.
Facebook tops the data loss roll of shame
Data breaches have almost become a fact of everyday life, but there are still some that have greater impact than others.
Software company Intact has carried out an analysis of publicly available data to see which companies have suffered the most large-scale data breaches (involving more than 30,000 records or more) over the last 16 years.
Happy Identity Management Day
Every dog has its day as the saying goes and it's increasingly the case that every aspect of information technology has one too -- a day that is, not a dog.
Today is Identity Management Day, created by the The National Cybersecurity Alliance and the Identity Defined Security Alliance. It's the first one so you can forgive the lack of greetings cards and themed balloons in the shops but there is plenty of industry comment.
DuckDuckGo's Chrome extension blocks Google's controversial new FLoC tracking technique
That Google tracks internet usage is hardly news -- it how the company has operated for years, and it is central to its business model. But the search giant recently started testing a new technique for delivering targeted ads to people called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), and it's now enabled for millions of users by default.
While Google is insistent that FLoC is "privacy-preserving mechanism" and one that " enables ad selection without sharing the browsing behavior of individual users", the algorithm remains controversial for many. The cookie-free technique uses fingerprinting which the likes of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other privacy groups have expressed great concern about. For anyone who would like to block Google's new tracking method, DuckDuckGo's Chrome extension is here to help.
Consumers show more interest in exercising privacy rights
Consumers are exercising their privacy rights -- to access, delete or stop the sale of their data -- under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which came into force last year.
A new report from privacy platform DataGrail shows that consumers are increasingly concerned about their personal information and how it's used. It also reveals that the number of data subject requests (DSRs) companies receive varies wildly, depending on their privacy practices.
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