Articles about Privacy

An investigation by NBC News has found that photo memories app Ever has been using billions of images uploaded by people to develop a facial recognition system without making it obvious to users.

Ever is a photo storage app that offers "free, unlimited private backup of all your life's memories". It's not until you delve into the company's privacy policy that you learn that in using the service, users are agreeing not only to have their photos used in facial recognition training, but also for Ever to sell the resulting technology to private companies, law enforcement agencies and the military.

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A slip-up by Mozilla stopped Firefox add-ons from working last weekend, and the company issued a fix followed by an update to the browser to get things back to normal. Mozilla has now issued an apology, a detailed explanation about what happened, and made a promise to delete the private data collected by those who used the first fix.

The initial fix that was issued via Firefox's Studies system required users to enable telemetry. Many people have such data-collection options disabled for privacy reasons, and Mozilla says that it will delete any data that it collected for its entire user base.

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Do you know how every company you interact with uses your private data? Consider this: In December 2018, The New York Times revealed that tech and marketing companies use seemingly innocuous apps to gain access to users’ locations -- sometimes up to 14,000 times each day.

For example, the Weather Channel app funneled users’ location data to an IBM subsidiary, while Reveal Mobile, a location-based marketing firm, harvested users’ location data from code planted in more than 500 other apps. It’s safe to say that most people trusted the Weather Channel app to make daily decisions about what to wear or whether to take an umbrella. After the news broke, however, the Weather Channel’s status as a trusted institution was less certain.

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Although many transactions are now carried out online, contact centers remain an important tool for businesses.

Call and contact center payment security solutions provider Semafone has had its latest Cardprotect (version 4) product validated by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) against the latest version of the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS). This makes it one of the only companies in the industry to provide this level of certification.

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A new study from Webroot that examines the cyber hygiene habits of 10,000 Americans, 200 in each state, reveals that 88 percent feel they take the right steps to protect themselves from cyberattacks.

However, just 10 percent scored 90 percent or higher on a cyber hygiene test, with the average respondent getting only 60 percent.

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The UK tax authority, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), has been forced to deleted voice recording of five million taxpayers. The recordings were made without consent, which the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said constituted a "significant" breach of data and privacy rules.

Before being allowed to access HMRC services, callers were required to repeat the phrase "My voice is my password". This recording was fed into the authority's biometric voice ID database, and violated GDPR rules.

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The censorial Great Firewall of China is famed throughout the world for the restrictions it places on Chinese citizens. Internet users play a game of cat and mouse, seeking tools and methods for slipping through the censoring and spying that the government enforces.

But it is getting harder and harder to evade the Great Firewall. VPNs that once allowed unfettered access to the greater internet are quickly stomped on by the Chinese government, just as happens in Russia. At the end of March, a new update to the firewall blacklisted hundreds of VPN servers and now fewer VPN tools than ever work in China. So which is the best VPN for those fighting the Great Firewall?

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Google has announced that it is giving users greater control over how long the company holds on to location history and activity data.

A new time-limiting feature makes it possible to have information such as account activity and location data automatically deleted after a period of time. The privacy-focused move comes after feedback to Google which found users wanted the company to provide simpler ways to manage or delete the private data it holds.

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The latest data risk report from security company Varonis reveals that 53 percent of companies have at least 1,000 sensitive files open to all employees, putting them at risk of data breaches.

Keeping old sensitive data that risks fines under HIPAA, GDPR and the upcoming CCPA is a problem too. The report finds over half of data is stale and 87 percent of companies have over 1,000 stale sensitive files, with 71 percent having over 5,000 stale sensitive files.

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Data privacy is a major concern for businesses, made more acute by the raft of new compliance and data protection rules appearing around the world.

Immuta is launching a platform with no-code, automated governance features that enable business analysts and data scientists to securely share and collaborate with data, dashboards, and scripts without fear of violating data policy and industry regulations.

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Following the revelation that Facebook "unintentionally" scraped and uploaded 1.5 million users' email contacts, the New York attorney general's office has announced that it is opening an investigation into the social media giant.

Attorney general Letitia James said that it is "time Facebook is held accountable for how it handles consumers' personal information".

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It seems that barely a week passes without another Facebook scandal emerging, and this week is no different. The company has revealed that it accidentally uploaded the email contacts of up to 1.5 million users who signed up for the social network since 2016.

A glitch meant that new users who signed up for email password verification had their email contacts scraped and uploaded without consent. As of last month , Facebook stopped offering this verification option to first-time users, although it's not clear if this is because of the privacy issue.

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The Internet Society's Online Trust Alliance (OTA), which identifies and promotes online security and privacy best practices, announced today the results of its latest Online Trust Audit and Honor Roll.

The Audit finds that 70 percent of analyzed websites qualified for the Honor Roll, the highest proportion ever, and up from 52 percent in 2017, driven primarily by improvements in email authentication and session encryption.

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Apple is one of the most privacy-focused tech companies. It has consistently protected its users, going so far as to defy the US Government by refusing to unlock an iPhone for the FBI. Conversely, Google makes a lot of its money from advertising and tracking users, while Microsoft has extreme telemetry in Windows 10.

And that's why it is so surprising that Mozilla -- another privacy-focused organization -- is criticizing Apple. You see, the Firefox-maker is calling out Apple for allowing advertisers to track iPhone users. Mozilla is going so far as to launch a petition, hoping to get Apple to change an important iPhone default setting.

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Mozilla has added new protective features to the nightly and beta versions of Firefox. Through a partnership with Disconnect, the browser is now able to block cryptocurrency mining and fingerprinting scripts.

The new features mean that users are protected against scripts that can be used to track them online, as well as those that use CPU cycles to mine for cryptocurrency. Mozilla says it is part of its mission to protect people from "threats and annoyances on the web".

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