Good data privacy practices by companies are good for the world. We wake up every day excited to change the world and keep the internet that we all know and love safe and transparent.

Last year, Facebook said it would stop listening to voice notes in messenger to improve its speech recognition technology. Now, the company is starting a new program where it will explicitly ask you to submit your recordings, and earn money in return.

The most popular modern secure messaging tool is Signal, which won the Levchin Prize at Real World Cryptography for its cryptographic privacy design. Signal currently requires phone numbers for all its users. It does this not because Signal wants to collect contact information for its users, but rather because Signal is allergic to it: using phone numbers means Signal can piggyback on the contact lists users already have, rather than storing those lists on its servers. A core design goal of the most important secure messenger is to avoid keeping a record of who’s talking to whom. Not every modern secure messenger is as conscientious as Signal. But they’re all better than Internet email, which doesn’t just collect metadata, but actively broadcasts it. Email on the Internet is a collaboration between many different providers; and each hop on its store-and-forward is another point at which metadata is logged. .

Research ethics concerns issues, such as privacy, anonymity, informed consent and the sensitivity of data. Given that social media is part of society’s tendency to liquefy and blur the boundaries between the private and the public, labour/leisure, production/consumption (Fuchs, 2015a: Chapter 8), research ethics in social media research is par-ticularly complex.

I suspect that Wacom doesn’t really think that it’s acceptable to record the name of every application I open on my personal laptop. I suspect that this is why their privacy policy doesn’t really admit that this is what that they do.

“Privacy in law means various things,” he writes; “and one of the things it means is protection from intrusion.” He argues that in advertising, open performance, and public-address systems, “these may validly be regulated” to prevent porn from being thrust upon the unsuspecting and unwilling. It is an extension of broadcast regulation. And that is something we grapple with still: What is shown to us, whether we want it shown to us, and how it gets there: by way of algorithm or editor or bot. What is our right not to see?

Now, Google has to change its practices and prompt users to choose their own default search engine when setting up a European Android device that has the Google Search app built in. Not all countries will have the same options, however, as the choices included in Google’s new prompt all went to the highest bidders.As it turns out, DuckDuckGo must have bid more aggressively than other Google competitors, as it’s being offered as a choice across all countries in the EU.

A Microsoft programme to transcribe and vet audio from Skype and Cortana, its voice assistant, ran for years with “no security measures”, according to a former contractor who says he reviewed thousands of potentially sensitive recordings on his personal laptop from his home in Beijing over the two years he worked for the company.

any protester who brings a phone to a public demonstration is tracked and that person’s presence at the event is duly recorded in commercial datasets. At the same time, political parties are beginning to collect and purchase phone location for voter persuasion.

“Privacy needs to start being seen as a human right.”

I understand that GitHub uses "Not Found" where it means "Forbidden" in some circumstances to prevent inadvertently reveling the existence of a private repository. Requests that require authentication will return 404 Not Found, instead of 403 Forbidden, in some places. This is to prevent the accidental leakage of private repositories to unauthorized users. --GitHub This is a fairly common practice around the web, indeed it is defined: The 404 (Not Found) status code indicates that the origin server did not find a current representation for the target resource or is not willing to disclose that one exists. --6.5.4. 404 Not Found, RFC 7231 HTTP/1.1 Semantics and Content (emphasis mine)

Google found 1,494 device identifiers in SensorVault, sending them to the ATF to comb through. In terms of numbers, that’s unprecedented for this form of search. It illustrates how Google can pinpoint a large number of mobile phones in a brief period of time and hand over that information to the government

Google found 1,494 device identifiers in SensorVault, sending them to the ATF to comb through. In terms of numbers, that’s unprecedented for this form of search. It illustrates how Google can pinpoint a large number of mobile phones in a brief period of time and hand over that information to the government

Loading this iframe allows Facebook to know that this specific user is currently on your website. Facebook therefore knows about user browsing behaviour without user’s explicit consent. If more and more websites adopt Facebook SDK then Facebook would potentially have user’s full browsing history! And as with “With great power comes great responsibility”, it’s part of our job as developers to protect users privacy even when they don’t ask for.

half of iPhone users don’t know there’s a unique ID on their phone (called an IDFA, for “identifier for advertisers”) tracking their app activity and sending it to third-party advertisers by default.

How you use our services and your devicesThis includes: call records containing phone numbers you call and receive calls from, websites you visit, text records, wireless location, application and feature usage, product and device-specific information and identifiers, router connections, service options you choose, mobile and device numbers, video streaming and video packages and usage, movie rental and purchase data, TV and video viewership, and other similar information.

Demographic and interest dataFor example, this information could include gender, age range, education level, sports enthusiast, frequent diner and other demographics and interests.

Information from social media platformsThis may include interests, "likes" and similar information you permit social media companies to share in this way.

Information from Verizon MediaFor example, we may receive information from Verizon Media to help us understand your interests to help make our advertising more relevant to you.

Learn about the information Verizon collects about you, your devices and your use of products and services we provide. We collect information when you interact with us and use our products and services. The types of information we collect depends on your use of our products and services and the ways that you interact with us. This may include information about: Contact, billing and other information you provide 1 How you use our services and your devices 2 How you use our websites and apps 3 How our network and your devices are working 4 Location of your wireless devices

Google has confirmed that it partnered with health heavyweight Ascension, a Catholic health care system based in St. Louis that operates across 21 states and the District of Columbia.

Found a @facebook #security & #privacy issue. When the app is open it actively uses the camera. I found a bug in the app that lets you see the camera open behind your feed.

Speaking with MIT Technology Review, Rohit Prasad, Alexa’s head scientist, has now revealed further details about where Alexa is headed next. The crux of the plan is for the voice assistant to move from passive to proactive interactions. Rather than wait for and respond to requests, Alexa will anticipate what the user might want. The idea is to turn Alexa into an omnipresent companion that actively shapes and orchestrates your life. This will require Alexa to get to know you better than ever before.

From Peg Cheechi, an instructional designer at Rush University: informing faculty members about the advantages of working with experts in course design.

An explosive trove of nearly 4,000 pages of confidential internal Facebook documentation has been made public, shedding unprecedented light on the inner workings of the Silicon Valley social networking giant.

Clear affirmative action means someone must take deliberate action to opt in, even if this is not expressed as an opt-in box. For example, other affirmative opt-in methods might include signing a consent statement, oral confirmation, a binary choice presented with equal prominence, or switching technical settings away from the default. The key point is that all consent must be opt-in consent – there is no such thing as ‘opt-out consent’. Failure to opt out is not consent. You may not rely on silence, inactivity, default settings, pre-ticked boxes or your general terms and conditions, or seek to take advantage of inertia, inattention or default bias in any other way.

Although the GDPR doesn’t specifically ban opt-out consent, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) says that opt-out options “are essentially the same as pre-ticked boxes, which are banned”.

Somewhere in a cavernous, evaporative cooled datacenter, one of millions of blinking Facebook servers took our credentials, used them to authenticate to our private email account, and tried to pull information about all of our contacts. After clicking Continue, we were dumped into the Facebook home page, email successfully “confirmed,” and our privacy thoroughly violated.

AdNauseam

We are disturbed by the idea that search inquiries are systematically monitored and stored by corporations like AOL, Yahoo!, Google, etc. and may even be available to third parties. Because the Web has grown into such a crucial repository of information and our search behaviors profoundly reflect who we are, what we care about, and how we live our lives, there is reason to feel they should be off-limits to arbitrary surveillance. But what can be done?

If the apparatus of total surveillance that we have described here were deliberate, centralized, and explicit, a Big Brother machine toggling between cameras, it would demand revolt, and we could conceive of a life outside the totalitarian microscope.

) Blockchain MemoryWe let LL be the blockchain mem-ory space, represented as the hastable L:{0,1}256→{0,1}NL:\{0,1\}^{256}\rightarrow \{0, 1\}^{N}, where N≫N \gg 256 and can store sufficiently-large documents. We assume this memory to be tamperproof under the same adversarial model used in Bitcoin and other blockchains. To intuitively explain why such a trusted data-store can be implemented on any blockchain (including Bitcoin), consider the following simplified, albeit inefficient, implementation: A blockchain is a sequence of timestamped transactions, where each transaction includes a variable number of output addresses (each address is a 160-bit number). LL could then be implemented as follows - the first two outputs in a transaction encode the 256-bit memory address pointer, as well as some auxiliary meta-data. The rest of the outputs construct the serialized document. When looking up L[k]L[k], only the most recent transaction is returned, which allows update and delete operations in addition to inserts.

Per Bloomberg, which cited an memo from an anonymous Google staffer, employees discovered that the company was creating the new tool as a Chrome browser extension that would be installed on all employees’ systems and used to monitor their activities.

the absence of a social contract

On social media, we are at the mercy of the platform. It crops our images the way it wants to. It puts our posts in the same, uniform grids. We are yet another profile contained in a platform with a million others, pushed around by the changing tides of a company's whims. Algorithms determine where our posts show up in people’s feeds and in what order, how someone swipes through our photos, where we can and can’t post a link. The company decides whether we're in violation of privacy laws for sharing content we created ourselves. It can ban or shut us down without notice or explanation. On social media, we are not in control.

To wit: iOS 13, which will be generally released later this week, has already been spotted catching Facebook’s app trying to use Bluetooth to track nearby users.

There is already a lot of information Facebook can assume from that simple notification: that you are probably a woman, probably menstruating, possibly trying to have (or trying to avoid having) a baby. Moreover, even though you are asked to agree to their privacy policy, Maya starts sharing data with Facebook before you get to agree to anything. This raises some serious transparency concerns.

Even if you choose not to use Wi-Fi services we make available at MGM Resorts, we may still collect information concerning the precise physical location of your mobile device within and around MGM Resorts for non-marketing purposes. 

Now, I'd rather pay for a product that sticks around than have my personal data sold to use a free product that may not be around tomorrow. I value my privacy much more today. If you're not paying for the product... you are the product being sold.

Even if we never see this brain-reading tech in Facebook products (something that would probably cause just a little concern), researchers could use it to improve the lives of people who can’t speak due to paralysis or other issues.

That’s very different from the system Facebook described in 2017: a noninvasive, mass-market cap that lets people type more than 100 words per minute without manual text entry or speech-to-text transcription.

Their work demonstrates a method of quickly “reading” whole words and phrases from the brain — getting Facebook slightly closer to its dream of a noninvasive thought-typing system.

If Bluetooth is ON on your Apple device everyone nearby can understand current status of your device, get info about battery, device name, Wi-Fi status, buffer availability, OS version and even get your mobile phone number

Comparison between web browsers

Two years ago, when he moved from Boston to London, he had to register with a general practitioner. The doctor’s office gave him a form to sign saying that his medical data would be shared with other hospitals he might go to, and with a system that might distribute his information to universities, private companies and other government departments.The form added that the although the data are anonymized, “there are those who believe a person can be identified through this information.”“That was really scary,” Dr. de Montjoye said. “We are at a point where we know a risk exists and count on people saying they don’t care about privacy. It’s insane.”

Scientists at Imperial College London and Université Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, reported in the journal Nature Communications that they had devised a computer algorithm that can identify 99.98 percent of Americans from almost any available data set with as few as 15 attributes, such as gender, ZIP code or marital status.

snafus, like those of privacy settings

There is usually never a line at the train ticketing machines. Judging from an overheard convo, it appears that people are reluctant to use their rechargeable Octopus cards for fear of leaving a paper trail of them having been present at the protest.

Honey’s products do not support Do Not Track requests at this time, which means that we collect information about your online activity while you are using Honey’s products in the manner described above.

Once you delete your profile, there is no longer any data attributable to you.

After you have terminated your use of Honey’s products, we will store your information in an aggregated and anonymised format.

as long as is required

That means while you are using the Extension and Honey is saving you money,

While you are using the Extension, this does NOT include any information from your search engine history or from your email.

They’ve learned, and that’s more dangerous than caring, because that means they’re rationally pricing these harms. The day that 20% of consumers put a price tag on privacy, freemium is over and privacy is back.

Unsurprisingly living up to its reputation, Facebook refuses to comply with my GDPR Subject Access Requests in an appropriate manner.

Now, how does that mother build an online scrapbook of all the items that were poured into the system?

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the Pokémon Go-style smartphone game co-developed by Niantic and WB Games

The report also noted a 27 percent increase in the number of foreigners whose communications were targeted by the NSA during the year. In total, an estimated 164,770 foreign individuals or groups were targeted with search terms used by the NSA to monitor their communications, up from 129,080 on the year prior.

we get some of it by collecting data about your interactions, use and experiences with our products. The data we collect depends on the context of your interactions with Microsoft and the choices that you make, including your privacy settings and the products and features that you use. We also obtain data about you from third parties.

Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said Thursday that Motel 6 shared the information of about 80,000 guests in the state from 2015 to 2017. That led to targeted investigations of guests with Latino-sounding names, according to Ferguson. He said many guests faced questioning from ICE, detainment or deportation as a result of the disclosures. It's the second settlement over the company's practice in recent months.

LastPass is run by LogMeIn, Inc. which is based in United States. So let’s say the NSA knocks on their door: “Hey, we need your data on XYZ so we can check their terrorism connections!” As we know by now, NSA does these things and it happens to random people as well, despite not having any ties to terrorism. LastPass data on the server is worthless on its own, but NSA might be able to pressure the company into sending a breach notification to this user.

Facebook users are being interrupted by an interstitial demanding they provide the password for the email account they gave to Facebook when signing up. “To continue using Facebook, you’ll need to confirm your email,” the message demands. “Since you signed up with [email address], you can do that automatically …”A form below the message asked for the users’ “email password.”

As one of 13 million officially designated “discredited individuals,” or laolai in Chinese, 47-year-old Kong is banned from spending on “luxuries,” whose definition includes air travel and fast trains.

Discredited individuals have been barred from taking a total of 17.5 million flights and 5.5 million high-speed train trips as of the end of 2018, according to the latest annual report by the National Public Credit Information Center.The list of “discredited individuals” was introduced in 2013, months before the State Council unveiled a plan in 2014 to build a social credit system by 2020.

Amazon has been beta testing the ads on Apple Inc.’s iOS platform for several months, according to people familiar with the plan. A similar product for Google’s Android platform is planned for later this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorized to share the information publicly.

Sharing of user data is routine, yet far from transparent. Clinicians should be conscious of privacy risks in their own use of apps and, when recommending apps, explain the potential for loss of privacy as part of informed consent. Privacy regulation should emphasise the accountabilities of those who control and process user data. Developers should disclose all data sharing practices and allow users to choose precisely what data are shared and with whom.

To investigate whether and how user data are shared by top rated medicines related mobile applications (apps) and to characterise privacy risks to app users, both clinicians and consumers.

Less than a third of the apps that collect identifiers take only the Advertising ID, as recommended by Google's best practices for developers.

“It’s, like, maybe you could have a conversation about whether you should be able to pay and not see ads. That doesn’t feel like a moral question to me. But the question of whether you can pay to have different privacy controls feels wrong.”

though it might break Facebook’s revenue machine by pulling the most affluent and desired users out of the ad targeting pool.

Growing Focus on Measuring Learning

Nearly half of FBI rap sheets failed to include information on the outcome of a case after an arrest—for example, whether a charge was dismissed or otherwise disposed of without a conviction, or if a record was expunged

Applicants also agree to have their fingerprints entered into DHS’ Automatic Biometric Identification System (IDENT) “for recurrent immigration, law enforcement, and intelligence checks, including checks against latent prints associated with unsolved crimes.

It cited research, including some authored by the FBI, indicating that “some of the biometrics at the core of NGI, like facial recognition, may misidentify African Americans, young people, and women at higher rates than whites, older people, and men, respectively.

for as long as your fingerprints and associated information are retained in NGI, your information may be disclosed pursuant to your consent or without your consent.

people enrolled in, or applying to, the program consent to have their personal data added to the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) database, shared with “federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, or foreign government agencies”, and DHS third-party “grantees, experts, [and] consultants” forever.

as part of the application process, TSA collects a cache of personal information about you, including your prints. They’re held in a database for 75 years, and the database is queried by the FBI and state and local law enforcement as needed to solve crimes at which fingerprints are lifted from crime scenes, according to Nojeim. The prints may also be used for background checks.

by providing their passport information and a copy of their fingerprints. According to CBP, registrants must also pass a background check and an interview with a CBP officer before they may be enrolled in the program

including data breaches and bankruptcy, experienced by “Clear,” a similar registered traveler program

Both afford us the op-portunity to learn with others, but they are very different environments with different po-tential risks and benefits.

被修复的并不是这些互联网巨头，而是区块链本身。那些承诺将世界从资本主义的枷锁中解放出来的加密货币创业公司，现在甚至无法保证其自己员工的收益。Facebook的方法是整合区块链的碎片并紧跟潮流，从而让股东更容易接受。

Instagram, otra red de su propiedad. “¿Por qué debería alguien seguir creyendo en Facebook?”, fue uno de los artículos publicados. Foto: AP

Does the widespread and routine collection of student data in ever new and potentially more-invasive forms risk normalizing and numbing students to the potential privacy and security risks?

Can Education Keep Up with Technology?

how do we help students navigate privacy issues in learning spaces augmented with social/digital media. There was a specific request for examples to walk students through this. Here is what I do.

just 28 percent of the 3,000 Facebook users surveyed by the organization believe Facebook is committed to privacy.

// Download a json but don't reveal who is downloading it fetch("sneaky.json", {referrerPolicy: "no-referrer"}) .then(function(response) { /* consume the response */ }); // Download a json but pretend another page is downloading it fetch("sneaky.json", {referrer: "https://example.site/fake.html"}) .then(function(response) { /* consume the response */ }); // You can only set same-origin referrers. fetch("sneaky.json", {referrer: "https://cross.origin/page.html"}) .catch(function(exc) { // exc.name == "TypeError" // exc.message == "Referrer URL https://cross.origin/page.html cannot be cross-origin to the entry settings object (https://example.site)." }); // Download a potentially cross-origin json and don't reveal // the full referrer URL across origins fetch(jsonURL, {referrerPolicy: "origin-when-cross-origin"}) .then(function(response) { /* consume the response */ }); // Download a potentially cross-origin json and reveal a // fake referrer URL on your own origin only. fetch(jsonURL, {referrer: "https://example.site/fake.html", referrerPolicy: "origin-when-cross-origin"}) .then(function(response) { /* consume the response */ });

By last year, Google’s parent, Alphabet, was spending more money on lobbyists than any other corporation in America.

“Under this law, the attorney general of California will become the chief privacy officer of the United States of America,” Mactaggart argued.

“Silicon Valley’s model puts the onus on the user to decide if the bargain is fair,” Soltani told me recently. “It’s like selling you coffee and making it your job to decide if the coffee has lead in it.” When it comes to privacy, he said, “we have no baseline law that says you can’t put lead in coffee.”

Google also says location records stored in My Activity are used to target ads. Ad buyers can target ads to specific locations — say, a mile radius around a particular landmark — and typically have to pay more to reach this narrower audience. While disabling “Web & App Activity” will stop Google from storing location markers, it also prevents Google from storing information generated by searches and other activity. That can limit the effectiveness of the Google Assistant, the company’s digital concierge. Sean O’Brien, a Yale Privacy Lab researcher with whom the AP shared its findings, said it is “disingenuous” for Google to continuously record these locations even when users disable Location History. “To me, it’s something people should know,” he said.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia told the AP it is “frustratingly common” for technology companies “to have corporate practices that diverge wildly from the totally reasonable expectations of their users,” and urged policies that would give users more control of their data. Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey called for “comprehensive consumer privacy and data security legislation” in the wake of the AP report.

Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.” That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking. (It’s possible, although laborious, to delete it .)

Storing your minute-by-minute travels carries privacy risks and has been used by police to determine the location of suspects — such as a warrant that police in Raleigh, North Carolina, served on Google last year to find devices near a murder scene. So the company lets you “pause” a setting called Location History.

Teaching Students About Privacy

I am not, and will never be, a simple writer. I have sought to convict, accuse, comfort, and plead with my readers. I’m leaving the majority of my flaws online: Go for it, you can find them if you want. It’s a choice I made long ago.

Wire Privacy Whitepaper

Messenger Wire teilt Daten mit Analysefirma Mixpanel

where applicable, any rating in the form of a data trust score that may be assignedto the data fiduciary under section 35;and

the period for which the personal data will beretained in terms of section 10 or where such period is not known, the criteria for determining such period;

Upon receipt of notification, the Authority shall determine whether such breach should be reported by the data fiduciaryto the data principal, taking into account the severity of the harm that may be caused to such data principal or whether some action is required on the part of the data principal to mitigate suchharm.

“Personal data breach”means any unauthorised or accidental disclosure, acquisition, sharing, use, alteration, destruction, loss of access to, of personal data that compromises the confidentiality, integrity or availability of personal data to a data principal;

Notwithstanding anything contained in sub-sections (1) and (2), the Act shall not apply toprocessing ofanonymised data.

in connection with any activity which involves profiling of data principals within the territory of India.

in connection with any business carried on in India, or any systematic activity of offering goods or services to data principals within the territory of India; or