Way back in 2018, people noticed that you could find secret military bases using data published by the Strava fitness app. Soldiers and other military personal were using them to track their runs, and you could look at the public data and find places where there should be no …
An Australian news agency is reporting that robot vacuum cleaners from the Chinese company Deebot are surreptitiously taking photos and recording audio, and sending that data back to the vendor to train their AIs. Ecovacs’s privacy policy— available elsewhere in the app —allows for blanket collection of user …
This is a big deal. A US Appeals Court ruled that geofence warrants—these are general warrants demanding information about all people within a geographical boundary—are unconstitutional. The decision seems obvious to me, but you can’t take anything for granted. [...]
I am the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc., the company that is commercializing Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid open W3C standard for distributed data ownership. This week, we announced a digital wallet based on the Solid architecture. Details are here, but basically a digital wallet is a repository …
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is excited to announce that AWS Wickr has achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorization at the High impact level from the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB). FedRAMP is a U.S. government–wide program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud services …
Consumer Reports is reporting that Facebook has built a massive surveillance network: Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the …
In October, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed a set of rules that if implemented would transform how financial institutions handle personal data about their customers. The rules put control of that data back in the hands of ordinary Americans, while at the same time undermining the data …
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. [...]
AWS re:Invent drew 52,000 attendees from across the globe to Las Vegas, Nevada, November 27 to December 1, 2023. Now in its 12th year, the conference featured 5 keynotes, 17 innovation talks, and over 2,250 sessions and hands-on labs offering immersive learning and networking opportunities. Amazon …
Add pharmacies to the list of industries that are giving private data to the police without a warrant. [...]