Privacy

With the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) having come into force at the beginning of the year, and Data Privacy Day coming up next week, privacy is very much in the news at the moment.

But how much of an impact will the new legislation have? And what do organizations need to do to make sure they don't lose consumer trust? We spoke to Chad McDonald, VP of customer experience at Arxan to find out more.

Apple's Safari web browser was found to have multiple security flaws that allowed for user's online activity to be tracked, say Google researchers.

In a yet-to-be-published paper, the researchers reveal issues in a Safari feature which is actually supposed to increase user privacy. The Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature found in the iOS, iPadOS and macOS version of the browser is meant to block tracking, but vulnerabilities mean that third parties could have accessed sensitive information about users' browsing habits.

A new report reveals how Microsoft exposed nearly 250 million Customer Service and Support records online late last year.

The security research team at Comparitech discovered five servers, each of which contained the same 250 million logs of conversations with Microsoft support agents and customers. The records, which spanned 2005 to December 2019, were accessible to anyone with internet access; no password protection or encryption was used.

A new online fraud scheme is designed to trick people into thinking they are owed compensation for data leaks only to scam them out of cash.

Researchers at Kaspersky uncovered the scam which tries to get users to purchase 'temporary US social security numbers' at a cost of around $9 each. Victims have been found in Russia, Algeria, Egypt and the UAE, as well as other countries.

A lot has been written about the consumerization of IT, but when it comes to personal security Josh Wyatt, VP of global services engagement at Optiv Security, believes consumers would be well served to take a page from the corporate cybersecurity playbook and adopt a 'zero trust' security strategy.

We recently spoke with Josh to find out how zero trust security can help consumers defend against cyberattacks, what types of threats we need to be aware of, and how this all relates to the business world.

Over the past few years, we've seen a surge in popularity for both consumer fintech apps, as well as fintech services for businesses.

This shift in the financial services ecosystem has empowered users to take greater control of their financial lives, equipping them with tools to better understand how and where they spend their money, increase their credit scores, prepare taxes, aggregate disparate financial and investment accounts, among many other applications.

As we entered 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) came into force, giving residents of California GDPR-like rights and protection. One of the rights afforded to people by the new law is to request that companies delete their user-specific data.

To comply with CCPA, Mozilla has announced that Firefox 72 -- due for release next week -- will include a new option that enables users to request the deletion of desktop telemetry. Although CCPA is only applicable in California, the new setting will be made available to Firefox users around the world.

Privacy and security are the guiding principles of ProtonMail, and now the company is expanding beyond email. The company has launched a beta version of ProtonCalendar, a privacy-focused alternative to Google Calendar.

ProtonMail claims that this is the "first fully encrypted calendar app", and says it offers a viable alternative to the companies (i.e. Google)  that "companies snoop on your calendar and use that information to inform their advertising".

With the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) set to come into force in January, privacy and how companies use data is set to be one of the big themes of 2020. What do some of the industry’s leading figures think this will mean?

Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder of Segment believes, "Though the GDPR roll-out should have given American companies a good taste of what was to come, it's still likely that most will do the bare minimum to comply with the CCPA until the US government starts enforcing it in 2020.

With deepfake voice fraud an increasing threat, new research shows that 30 percent of Americans are not confident they would be able to detect the difference between a computer generated voice and a human one.

The study from ID R&D, a provider of AI-based biometrics and voice and face anti-spoofing technologies, shows only just over a third (36 percent) are confident they could spot a fake.

Financial services business tend to be attacked more than those in any other sector, but a new study finds that 75 percent of respondents in this industry are over confident in their data management practices.

A worrying 24 percent of respondents to Integris Software's 2019 FinServ Data Privacy Maturity Study only update their personal data inventory once a year. Even more concerning, 13 percent only inventory sensitive data when audited or in response to regulation requests.

In the retail sector particularly the line between online and offline worlds is increasingly blurred. But how can businesses protect their customer data effectively in this world?

We spoke to, Gary Barnett, CEO of secure payment systems specialist Semafone to discuss this, the effect of the upcoming CCPA legislation and more.

According to a new report, more than 60 percent of all leaked records in 2019 were exposed by financial services organizations, despite only six percent of breaches affecting these organizations.

The 2019 Financial Breach Report from Bitglass says these figures are at least partially due to the Capital One breach, which compromised more than 100 million records.

New account fraud -- attempts by an individual to create a new online account by manipulating a government-issued ID -- is up 28 percent this year according to a new report.

Data from trusted identity provider Jumio shows this type of fraud has increased over 100 percent on 2014 levels.

With the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) coming into force in January and GDPR in Europe having been active for nearly two years, data privacy is something that's being taken more seriously than ever.

But what impact does legislation have on businesses and consumers? And how has GDPR influenced the drafting of CCPA? To find out we spoke to Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon, senior privacy counsel and legal engineer and Dan Wu, privacy counsel and legal engineer, from data governance specialist Immuta.