Massive Facebook leak exposes 419 million users' phone numbers
In its latest privacy lapse, Facebook has exposed the phone numbers of hundreds of millions of users on an unsecured server.
Databases on the server were not password-protected, and included details of 133 million US users, 50 million in Vietnam, and 18 million in the UK. In all 419 million records could be accessed by anyone looking in the right place.
Facebook now lets you opt out of automatic facial recognition
Facebook has announced changes to its facial recognition feature as it rolls out globally. The feature is used to automatically identify and tag people in photographs uploaded to the social network.
Acknowledging concerns about privacy, the company is making it easier to opt out of the "Tag Suggestions" feature which was introduced to a subset of users back in 2017. Now known as Face Recognition, new users will be given the chance to opt out from the word go, while anyone who has (or had) Tag Suggestions enabled will be informed of the change and asked whether it should be on or off.
Privacy concerns mount over Chinese face-swap app Zao
Zao -- a Chinese face-swapping app with the potential to be used to create deepfakes -- went viral over the weekend, shooting to the top of the App Store download charts. But concerns have been raised not only over the potential for the app to be abused, but also over its privacy policies.
Of particular concern are clauses which grant the developers "free, irrevocable, permanent, transferable, and relicense-able" rights over users' photos. Zao responded by tweaking its privacy policy, but complaints are still flooding in.
Foxit Software reveals data breach that exposed users' email addresses, passwords and more
Foxit Software has revealed that it "recently" suffered a security breach in which private user data was exposed to unnamed third parties. Those whose account have been affected are being contacted and "encouraged to change their passwords".
The company -- famed for PDF applications such as Foxit Reader and PhantomPDF -- does not say when the incident took place, nor how many users are affected, but it explains that "My Account" section of user accounts was exposed. This includes data such as email addresses, passwords, users' names, phone numbers, company names and IP addresses, but not payment information.
Big brother Elon isn't watching you -- but maybe he should be!
In an effort to reassure privacy advocates, Tesla announced that its new automobile insurance product for owners of the company’s popular electric vehicles will not use onboard sensor data from said vehicles in determining policy premiums. The fear was that the company would use the voluminous data collected by every Tesla Model 3, S or X to pre-judge the risk associated with specific drivers and penalize those who've demonstrated a propensity for speeding or other aggressive behavior.
Most news outlets are reporting this as a win for consumers, another bit of pushback against our intrusive, surveillance-state of a world. But my question is: Why? Or, rather, why not?
Apple apologizes for having contractors listen to Siri recordings and announces privacy changes
Following outcry over human "grading" of Siri recordings, Apple has issued an apology and promised that it will no longer retain recordings of interaction with the digital assistant unless given explicit permission.
The company says that "we haven't been fully living up to our high ideals, and for that we apologize". Having suspended the human grading of Siri requests, Apple is now making fundamental changes to its privacy policy saying that only Apple employees will be able to listen to recordings, as opposed to contractors, and users will have to opt in for this to happen.
Microsoft faces another European investigation over Windows 10 privacy concerns
Worries about privacy in Windows 10 show no signs of abating, with Europe expressing ongoing concerns about Microsoft's data gathering and telemetry.
Having already asked Microsoft to make modifications to Windows, the Dutch data protection agency (DPA) has since looked into what changes the company has implemented. Having found "new, potentially unlawful, instances of personal data processing", the agency is calling for an investigation by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), Microsoft's lead EU privacy regulator.
One in four workers would steal information to get a job at a competitor
Would you take information from your employer to help you get a job at a competitor? 24 percent would according to a new survey of almost 500 IT professionals carried out at Blackhat USA 2019.
The survey by behavior-based security specialist Gurucul finds that managed service providers (34 percent) and developers (30 percent) pose the leading sources of third party risk, and that if someone was to commit fraud it would most likely occur in the finance department (32 percent).
Over half of social media logins are fraudulent
Social media sites are a popular target for cybercriminals. It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise therefore to find that 53 percent of logins on social media sites are fraudulent and 25 percent of all new account applications are too.
These are among the findings of a study by anti-fraud platform Arkose Labs which analyzed over 1.2 billion transactions spanning account registrations, logins and payments from financial services, e-commerce, travel, social media, gaming and entertainment industries, in real time.
Cyber-stalking from 240 miles in the sky
"In space, no one can hear you…stalk?" That's the phrase that comes to mind as I sift through the sensationalist coverage of astronaut and decorated combat veteran Anne McClain's brief sojourn into the world of cyber-stalking. And while the act of checking up on an estranged spouse's financial activity is relatively common in a world where roughly half of all marriages (at least in Western countries) end up in divorce, the fact that Ms McClain chose to do so while orbiting the Earth at over 17,000 mph adds a degree of novelty to an otherwise mundane story.
Indeed, the purported "scene of the crime" introduces several new wrinkles to the matter, including under which jurisdiction her apparently illegal actions should fall. According to official sources, inhabitants of the International Space Station (ISS) are subject to the laws and regulations of their home countries. So, a Japanese astronaut is subject to Japanese law, a Russian to Russian law, etc.
Google seeks to make the web more private for Chromium users with Privacy Sandbox
Google is not a company synonymous with privacy, but the company increasingly recognizes the importance people place on it. With this in mind, it has launched a new initiative called Privacy Sandbox which aims to increase online privacy.
The bold goal is to "develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web", and one of the first proposals seeks to limit online track of users. It will limit fingerprinting, change the way targeted advertising works, and more.
Microsoft and others join the Linux Foundation's Confidential Computing Consortium
Microsoft, Google, Red Hat, IBM and Intel are among those to join the newly formed Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC). The new organization will be hosted at the Linux Foundation, having been established to help define and accelerate the adoption of confidential computing.
The company explains that, "confidential computing technologies offer the opportunity for organizations to collaborate on their data sets without giving access to that data, to gain shared insights and to innovate for the common good". Microsoft will be contributing the Open Enclave SDK that allows developers to build Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) applications using a single enclaving abstraction.
Microsoft contractors have been listening to audio captured via Xbox consoles
There have been lots of exposés over the last few weeks about the fact that numerous companies -- including Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Google -- have been listening to recordings of interactions between customers and digital assistants. The latest revelation is that Microsoft contractors have been listening to Xbox users.
A new report says that contractors working for Microsoft listened to audio clips recorded when Xbox users interacted with Kinect and Cortana on their consoles.
Facebook ups its privacy game (a bit) with new tool for users to control data shared by websites
Facebook has launched a new privacy tool, giving users the chance to see and control the data the social network collects about them from other websites.
Called Off-Facebook Activity, the new tool lets users restrict what is shared to Facebook by apps and websites. More than this, it enables Facebook users to sever ties between websites and the social network, with a view to limiting the personalization of ads on Facebook.
Google no longer lets you turn off status lights on Nest cameras
Google is rolling out updates to its Nest Cam, Dropcam and Nest Hello cameras that removes the option to disable status indicator lights.
Citing privacy, Google says that users should "always see a clear visual indicator when your Nest cameras are on and sending video and audio". The company might be introducing the change in the name of privacy, but owners of the devices are far from happy about it.
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