There are over a dozen cases around the country where police officers are using the Flock surveillance camera system to obsessively and illegally stalk people. Alternate link. [...]

A proposed FCC rule would kill burner phones: phones whose accounts are not attached to a particular person. The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country’s telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued identification number …

Not identifying people based on their use of Wi-Fi routers, but identifying people using Wi-Fi signals. This is accomplished through what is known as WiFi sensing, or the use of WiFi signals to infer information about a physical environment. When radio signals like WiFi travel through a space, they …

Businesses are advised against paying – but many are prepared to deal to protect users’ privacy After a week of outages, hundreds of millions of students’ data stolen, delayed assignment due dates and school login pages being defaced by hackers, the US tech firm Instructure – which operates the education platform …

Technology minister tells Commons ‘de-identified’ information from UK Biobank advertised for sale on Alibaba The confidential health records of half a million British volunteers have been offered for sale on Chinese website Alibaba, the UK government has confirmed. The “de-identified” data, belonging to participants in the UK Biobank project …

ICE has admitted that it uses spyware from the Israeli company Graphite. [...]

Grupo Seguritech is a Mexican surveillance company that is expanding into the US. [...]

Claude is actually pretty good on the issues. [...]

WebinarTV searches the internet for public Zoom invites, joins the meetings, secretly records them, and publishes (alternate link ) the recordings. It doesn’t use the Zoom record feature, so Zoom can’t do anything about it. [...]

Sen. Ron Wyden is warning us of an abuse of Section 702: Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the …

404 Media has a story about Proton Mail giving subscriber data to the Swiss government, who passed the information to the FBI. It’s metadata—payment information related to a particular account—but still important knowledge. This sort of thing happens, even to privacy-centric companies like Proton Mail. [...]

Surprising no one, Meta’s new AI glasses are a privacy disaster. I’m not sure what can be done here. This is a technology that will exist, whether we like it or not. Meanwhile, there is a new Android app that detects when there are smart glasses nearby …

Burner accounts on social media sites can increasingly be analyzed to identify the pseudonymous users who post to them using AI in research that has far-reaching consequences for privacy on the Internet, researchers said. The finding, from a recently published research paper, is based on results of experiments correlating …

It’s a demonstration of how toxic the surveillance-tech company Flock has become when Amazon’s Ring cancels the partnership between the two companies. As Hamilton Nolan advises, remove your Ring doorbell. [...]

New York is contemplating a bill that adds surveillance to 3D printers: New York’s 2026­2027 executive budget bill (S.9005 / A.10005) includes language that should alarm every maker, educator, and small manufacturer in the state. Buried in Part C is a provision requiring all 3D printers …

Michael suspects personal information he submitted to rent application platforms was leaked online. And analysis shows millions of documents may also be at risk Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Michael* has spent the past two months trying to get his digital identity back …

404Media is reporting that the FBI could not access a reporter’s iPhone because it had Lockdown Mode enabled: The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson …

Microsoft gives the FBI the ability to decrypt BitLocker in response to court orders: about twenty times per year. It’s possible for users to store those keys on a device they own, but Microsoft also recommends BitLocker users store their keys on its servers for convenience. While that …

This is coming : The Irish government is planning to bolster its police’s ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use. [...]

Websites that authenticate users through links and codes sent in text messages are imperiling the privacy of millions of people, leaving them vulnerable to scams, identity theft, and other crimes, recently published research has found. The links are sent to people seeking a range of services, including those offering …

It all sounds pretty dystopian : Inside a white stucco building in Southern California, video cameras compare faces of passersby against a facial recognition database. Behavioral analysis AI reviews the footage for signs of violent behavior. Behind a bathroom door, a smoke detector-shaped device captures audio, listening for sounds of …

The New York City Wegman’s is collecting biometric information about customers. [...]

Californians are getting a new, supercharged way to stop data brokers from hoarding and selling their personal information, as a recently enacted law that’s among the strictest in the nation took effect at the beginning of the year. According to the California Privacy Protection Agency, more than 500 …

404 Media has the story : Unlike many of Flock’s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock’s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people …

This is pretty scary : Urban VPN Proxy targets conversations across ten AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok (xAI), Meta AI. For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated “executor” script designed to intercept and capture conversations. The harvesting is enabled by default through hardcoded flags …