Google Maps now stores location data locally on your device, meaning that Google no longer has that data to turn over to the police. [...]

More unconstrained surveillance : Lawmakers noted the pharmacies’ policies for releasing medical records in a letter dated Tuesday to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra. The letter—signed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.)—said their investigation …

Enlarge / An assortment of Ubiquiti cameras. (credit: Ubiquiti ) Users of UniFi, the popular line of wireless devices from manufacturer Ubiquiti, are reporting receiving private camera feeds from, and control over, devices belonging to other users, posts published to social media site Reddit over the past 24 hours show. “Recently …

This seems like a bad idea. And there are ongoing lawsuits against Amazon for selling them. [...]

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images ) On Wednesday, news quickly spread on social media about a new enabled-by-default Dropbox setting that shares Dropbox data with OpenAI for an experimental AI-powered search feature, but Dropbox says data is only shared if the feature is actively being used. Dropbox says that user data …

This is not about mass surveillance of mail, this is about the sorts of targeted surveillance the US Postal Inspection Service uses to catch mail thieves : To track down an alleged mail thief, a US postal inspector used license plate reader technology, GPS data collected by a rental car …

When you get a push notification on your Apple or Google phone, those notifications go through Apple and Google servers. Which means that those companies can spy on them—either for their own reasons or in response to government demands. Sen. Wyden is trying to get to the bottom …

Spying and surveillance are different but related things. If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the …

There seems to be no end to warrantless surveillance : According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of …

Generative AI is going to be a powerful tool for data analysis and summarization. Here’s an example of it being used for sentiment analysis. My guess is that it isn’t very good yet, but that it will get better. [...]

Observer investigation reveals UK Biobank opened its biomedical database to insurance firms despite pledge it would not do so Sensitive health information donated for medical research by half a million UK citizens has been shared with insurance companies despite a pledge that it would not be. An Observer investigation …

Article based on a Mozilla report. [...]

This is an excerpt from a longer paper. You can read the whole thing (complete with sidebars and illustrations) here. Our message is simple: it is possible to get the best of both worlds. We can and should get the benefits of the cloud while taking security back into …

Apple has warned leaders of the opposition government in India that their phones are being spied on: Multiple top leaders of India’s opposition parties and several journalists have received a notification from Apple, saying that “Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers who are trying to …

Fascinating story of a covert wiretap that was discovered because of an expired TLS certificate: The suspected man-in-the-middle attack was identified when the administrator of jabber.ru, the largest Russian XMPP service, received a notification that one of the servers’ certificates had expired. However, jabber.ru found no expired …

Enlarge / Private Wi-Fi address setting on an iPhone. (credit: Apple) Three years ago, Apple introduced a privacy-enhancing feature that hid the Wi-Fi address of iPhones and iPads when they joined a network. On Wednesday, the world learned that the feature has never worked as advertised. Despite promises that this …

Interesting article about the Snowden documents, including comments from former Guardian editor Ewen MacAskill MacAskill, who shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras for their journalistic work on the Snowden files, retired from The Guardian in 2018. He told Computer Weekly that: As …

Susan Landau published an excellent essay on the current justification for the government breaking end-to-end-encryption: child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE). She puts the debate into historical context, discusses the problem of CSAE, and explains why breaking encryption isn’t the solution. [...]

Amnesty International has published a comprehensive analysis of the Predator government spyware products. These technologies used to be the exclusive purview of organizations like the NSA. Now they’re available to every country on the planet—democratic, nondemocratic, authoritarian, whatever—for a price. This is the legacy of not …

Enlarge / The 23andMe logo displayed on a smartphone screen. Genetic profiling service 23andMe has commenced an investigation after private user data was been scraped off its website Friday’s confirmation comes five days after an unknown entity took to an online crime forum to advertise the sale of private …

Enlarge / The 23andMe logo displayed on a smartphone screen. Genetic profiling service 23andMe has confirmed that private user data is circulating for sale online after being scraped off its website. Friday’s confirmation comes five days after an unknown entity took to an online crime forum to advertise the …

Totally expected, but still good to hear : Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which maintains the nonprofit Signal messaging app, reaffirmed that Signal would leave the U.K. if the country’s recently passed Online Safety Bill forced Signal to build “backdoors …

Jake Appelbaum’s PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits. Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago. At this point, those documents are more historical than anything else. And …

US Department of Justice questions compliance with FTC order on data security and privacy practices Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter created a “chaotic environment” at the social media platform that may have violated a government order requiring an overhaul of its data security and privacy practices, according to …

A new Mozilla Foundation report concludes that cars, all of them, have terrible data privacy. All 25 car brands we researched earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label—making cars the official worst category of products for privacy that we have ever reviewed. There’s a lot of details …