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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Enlarge / Gabriel Weinberg, creator of DuckDuckGo. Washington Post | Getty Images reader comments 13 with 10 posters participating Share this story At the end of April, Apple’s introduction of App Tracking Transparency tools shook the advertising industry to its core. iPhone and iPad owners could now stop apps from tracking their behavior and using their… Read More »
Enlarge / The Internet is unfortunately packed full of criminals seeking to steal sexual (or sexualizable) images from privately held cloud backup accounts. reader comments 34 with 22 posters participating, including story author Share this story The LA Times reported this week that Los Angeles man Hao Kuo “David” Chi pled guilty to four federal… Read More »
Jorg Greuel | Getty Images reader comments 36 with 26 posters participating Share this story More than a thousand web apps mistakenly exposed 38 million records on the open Internet, including data from a number of COVID-19 contact-tracing platforms, vaccination sign-ups, job application portals, and employee databases. The data included a range of sensitive information,… Read More »
Andriy Onufriyenko | Getty Images reader comments 11 with 11 posters participating Share this story Companies of all kinds use machine learning to analyze people’s desires, dislikes, or faces. Some researchers are now asking a different question: How can we make machines forget? A nascent area of computer science dubbed machine unlearning seeks ways to… Read More »
Enlarge / Pretty Good Phone Privacy wants to minimize how much your wireless provider knows about your location. Noam Galai | Getty Images reader comments 8 with 8 posters participating Share this story Location data sharing from wireless carriers has been a major privacy issue in recent years. Marketers, salespeople, and even bounty hunters were… Read More »
Getty Images reader comments 124 with 78 posters participating Share this story Venmo, the popular mobile payment service, has redesigned its app. That’s normally news you could safely ignore, but this announcement is worth a closer look. In addition to making some navigational tweaks and adding new purchase protections, the PayPal-owned platform is finally shutting… Read More »