Tag Archives: privacy

Artist finds private medical record photos in popular AI training data set

Enlarge / Censored medical images found in the LAION-5B data set used to train AI. The black bars and distortion have been added. Ars Technica reader comments 81 with 48 posters participating Share this story Late last week, a California-based AI artist who goes by the name Lapine discovered private medical record photos taken by her… Read More »

FTC sues data broker that tracks locations of 125M phones per month

reader comments 80 with 53 posters participating Share this story The Federal Trade Commission on Monday sued a data broker for allegedly selling location data culled from hundreds of millions of phones that can be used to track the movements of people visiting abortion clinics, domestic abuse shelters, places of worship, and other sensitive places.… Read More »

iOS VPNs have leaked traffic for more than 2 years, researcher claims

Getty Images reader comments 41 with 29 posters participating, including story author Share this story A security researcher says that Apple’s iOS devices don’t fully route all network traffic through VPNs as a user might expect, a potential security issue the device maker has known about for years. Michael Horowitz, a longtime computer security blogger… Read More »

Small businesses count cost of Apple’s privacy changes

Enlarge (credit: Kentaroo Tryman | Getty Images) Small businesses are cutting back marketing spending due to Apple’s sweeping privacy changes that have made it harder to target new customers online, in a growing trend that has led to billions of dollars in lost revenues for platforms like Facebook. Apple last year began forcing app developers… Read More »

End-to-end encryption’s central role in modern self-defense

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A number of course-altering US Supreme Court decisions last month—including the reversal of a constitutional right to abortion and the overturning of a century-old limit on certain firearms permits—have activists and average Americans around the country anticipating the fallout for rights and privacy as abortion “trigger laws,” expanded access to concealed… Read More »

Google closes data loophole amid privacy fears over abortion ruling

Enlarge (credit: Lari Bat | Getty Images) Google is closing a loophole that has allowed thousands of companies to monitor and sell sensitive personal data from Android smartphones, an effort welcomed by privacy campaigners in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s decision to end women’s constitutional right to abortion. It also took a further… Read More »

Your iOS app may still be covertly tracking you, despite what Apple says

Getty Images reader comments 68 with 46 posters participating, including story author Share this story Last year, Apple enacted App Tracking Transparency, a mandatory policy that forbids app makers from tracking user activity across other apps without first receiving those users’ explicit permission. Privacy advocates praised the initiative, and Facebook warned it would spell certain… Read More »

Brave takes on the creepy websites that override your privacy settings

Getty Images reader comments 53 with 32 posters participating Share this story Some websites just can’t take “no” for an answer. Instead of respecting visitors’ choice to block third-party cookies—the identifiers that track browsing activity as a user moves from site to site—they find sneaky ways to bypass those settings. Now, makers of the Brave… Read More »

Safari and iOS users: Your browsing activity is being leaked in real time

Getty Images reader comments 58 with 41 posters participating Share this story For the past four months, Apple’s iOS and iPadOS devices and Safari browser have violated one of the Internet’s most sacrosanct security policies. The violation results from a bug that leaks user identities and browsing activity in real time. The same-origin policy is… Read More »