Texas is suing General Motors for collecting driver data without consent and then selling it to insurance companies: From CNN : In car models from 2015 and later, the Detroit-based car manufacturer allegedly used technology to “collect, record, analyze, and transmit highly detailed driving data about each time a driver …
Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms. These algorithms have splintered the organization of culture, a result of states and tech companies vying for influence over mass audiences. One byproduct of this splintering is a shift from imperfect but broad cultural narratives to a proliferation of niche groups, who are …
The ProtonMail people are accusing Microsoft’s new Outlook for Windows app of conducting extensive surveillance on its users. It shares data with advertisers, a lot of data: The window informs users that Microsoft and those 801 third parties use their data for a number of purposes, including to …
The lawsuit has been settled : Google has agreed to delete “billions of data records” the company collected while users browsed the web using Incognito mode, according to documents filed in federal court in San Francisco on Monday. The agreement, part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit filed …
It finally admitted to buying bulk data on Americans from data brokers, in response to a query by Senator Weyden. This is almost certainly illegal, although the NSA maintains that it is legal until it’s told otherwise. Some news articles. [...]
There’s a rumor flying around the Internet that OpenAI is training foundation models on your Dropbox documents. Here’s CNBC. Here’s Boing Boing. Some articles are more nuanced, but there’s still a lot of confusion. It seems not to be true. Dropbox isn’t sharing all …
The new site 404 Media has a good article on how hackers are cheaply getting personal information from credit bureaus: This is the result of a secret weapon criminals are selling access to online that appears to tap into an especially powerful set of data: the target’s credit …
No surprise, but Google just changed its privacy policy to reflect broader uses of all the surveillance data it has captured over the years: Research and development : Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public …
Depending on where you are when you download your Android apps, it might collect more or less data about you. The apps we downloaded from Google Play also showed differences based on country in their security and privacy capabilities. One hundred twenty-seven apps varied in what the apps were …
This is from a court deposition : Facebook’s stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level. In the …
TheMarkup has an extensive analysis of connected vehicle data and the companies that are collecting it. The Markup has identified 37 companies that are part of the rapidly growing connected vehicle data industry that seeks to monetize such data in an environment with few regulations governing its sale or …
A surprising number of websites include JavaScript keyloggers that collect everything you type as you type it, not just when you submit a form. Researchers from KU Leuven, Radboud University, and University of Lausanne crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites, looking at scenarios in which a user …
John Oliver has an excellent segment on data brokers and surveillance capitalism. [...]
MIT Technology Review published an interview with Gil Herrera, the new head of the NSA’s Research Directorate. There’s a lot of talk about quantum computing, monitoring 5G networks, and the problems of big data: The math department, often in conjunction with the computer science department, helps tackle …
China is mandating that athletes download and use a health and travel app when they attend the Winter Olympics next month. Citizen Lab examined the app and found it riddled with security holes. Key Findings: MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games …
Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a bunch of writing about what seems to be fake COVID-19 testing sites. They take your name and info, and do a nose swab, but you never get test results. Speculation centered around data harvesting, but that didn’t make sense …
After being compelled by a Swiss court to monitor IP logs for a particular user, ProtonMail no longer claims that “we do not keep any IP logs.” [...]
This is important : Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill was general secretary of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), effectively the highest-ranking priest in the US who is not a bishop, before records of Grindr usage obtained from data brokers was correlated with his apartment, place of work, vacation home, family …
A Catholic priest was outed through commercially available surveillance data. Vice has a good analysis : The news starkly demonstrates not only the inherent power of location data, but how the chance to wield that power has trickled down from corporations and intelligence agencies to essentially any sort of disgruntled …
First California. Then Virginia. Now Colorado. Here’s a good comparison of the three states’ laws. [...]
If you’re a WhatsApp user, pay attention to the changes in the privacy policy that you’re being forced to agree with. In 2016, WhatsApp gave users a one-time ability to opt out of having account data turned over to Facebook. Now, an updated privacy policy is changing …