As many of us celebrated the year-end holidays, a small group of researchers worked overtime tracking a startling discovery: At least 33 browser extensions hosted in Google’s Chrome Web Store, some for as long as 18 months, were surreptitiously siphoning sensitive data from roughly 2.6 million devices …
Lukasz Olejnik writes about device fingerprinting, and why Google’s policy change to allow it in 2025 is a major privacy setback. [...]
Interesting analysis : We introduce and explore a little-known threat to digital equality and freedomwebsites geoblocking users in response to political risks from sanctions. U.S. policy prioritizes internet freedom and access to information in repressive regimes. Clarifying distinctions between free and paid websites, allowing trunk cables to repressive …
This feels important : The Secret Service has used a technology called Locate X which uses location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on phones. Because users agreed to an opaque terms of service page, the Secret Service believes it doesn’t need a warrant. [...]
Interesting analysis : Although much attention is given to sophisticated, zero-click spyware developed by companies like Israel’s NSO Group, the Italian spyware marketplace has been able to operate relatively under the radar by specializing in cheaper tools. According to an Italian Ministry of Justice document, as of December 2022 …
DeFlock is a crowd-sourced project to map license plate scanners. It only records the fixed scanners, of course. The mobile scanners on cars are not mapped. The post Mapping License Plate Scanners in the US appeared first on Schneier on Security. [...]
The Open Source Initiative has published (news article here ) its definition of “open source AI,” and it’s terrible. It allows for secret training data and mechanisms. It allows for development to be done in secret. Since for a neural network, the training data is the source code—it …
UK consumer group Which? finds some everyday items including watches and speakers are ‘stuffed with trackers’ Air fryers that gather your personal data and audio speakers “stuffed with trackers” are among examples of smart devices engaged in “excessive” surveillance, according to the consumer group Which? The organisation tested three …
You likely have never heard of Babel Street or Location X, but chances are good that they know a lot about you and anyone else you know who keeps a phone nearby around the clock. Reston, Virginia-located Babel Street is the little-known firm behind Location X, a service with …
An advocacy groups is filing a Fourth Amendment challenge against automatic license plate readers. “The City of Norfolk, Virginia, has installed a network of cameras that make it functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their movements tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that enables …
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 …
Dozens of neo-Nazis are fleeing Telegram and moving to a relatively unknown secret chat app that has received funding from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. In a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published on Friday morning, researchers found that in the wake of the arrest of Telegram founder …
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees. Meta disclosed the lapse in early 2019. The company said that apps for connecting to various Meta-owned social networks …
Enlarge (credit: The Tor Project) The Tor Project, the nonprofit that maintains software for the Tor anonymity network, is joining forces with Tails, the maker of a portable operating system that uses Tor. Both organizations seek to pool resources, lower overhead, and collaborate more closely on their mission of …
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) When security researcher Johann Rehberger recently reported a vulnerability in ChatGPT that allowed attackers to store false information and malicious instructions in a user’s long-term memory settings, OpenAI summarily closed the inquiry, labeling the flaw a safety issue, not, technically speaking, a security concern …
Ars Technica has a good article on what’s happening in the world of television surveillance. More than even I realized. [...]
This site will let you take a selfie with a New York City traffic surveillance camera. EDITED TO ADD: BoingBoing post. [...]
This is a fantastic project mapping the global surveillance industry. [...]
Consumer Reports has a new study of people-search site removal services, concluding that they don’t really work: As a whole, people-search removal services are largely ineffective. Private information about each participant on the people-search sites decreased after using the people-search removal services. And, not surprisingly, the removal services …
This article about an app that lets people remotely view bars to see if they’re crowded or not is filled with commentary—on both sides—about privacy and openness. [...]
Longtime NSA-watcher James Bamford has a long article on the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). [...]
Investigation launched after airline reported a suspicious network popped up during a domestic flight in April Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast A man has been charged after he allegedly set up fake …
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Proton, the secure-minded email and productivity suite, is becoming a nonprofit foundation, but it doesn't want you to think about it in the way you think about other notable privacy and web foundations. "We believe that if we want to bring about large-scale change, Proton …
Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was …
Brian Krebs reports on research into geolocating routers: Apple and the satellite-based broadband service Starlink each recently took steps to address new research into the potential security and privacy implications of how their services geolocate devices. Researchers from the University of Maryland say they relied on publicly available data …