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. [...]
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 …
Ars Technica has a good article on what’s happening in the world of television surveillance. More than even I realized. [...]
From Slashdot : Apple and Google have launched a new industry standard called “ Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers ” to combat the misuse of Bluetooth trackers for stalking. Starting Monday, iPhone and Android users will receive alerts when an unknown Bluetooth device is detected moving with them. The move comes after numerous …
A new bioadhesive makes it easier to attach trackers to squid. Note: the article does not discuss squid privacy rights. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here …
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 …
Tile has an interesting security solution to make its tracking tags harder to use for stalking: The Anti-Theft Mode feature will make the devices invisible to Scan and Secure, the company’s in-app feature that lets you know if any nearby Tiles are following you. But to activate the …
The two people who shut down four Washington power stations in December were arrested. This is the interesting part: Investigators identified Greenwood and Crahan almost immediately after the attacks took place by using cell phone data that allegedly showed both men in the vicinity of all four substations, according …
Researchers claim that supposedly anonymous device analytics information can identify users: On Twitter, security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry have found that Apple’s device analytics data includes an iCloud account and can be linked directly to a specific user, including their name, date of birth, email …
Enlarge (credit: Kentaroo Tryman | Getty Images ) Small businesses are cutting back marketing spending due to Apple’s sweeping privacy changes that have made it harder to target new customers online, in a growing trend that has led to billions of dollars in lost revenues for platforms like Facebook. Apple …
This is a dangerous vulnerability: An assessment from security firm BitSight found six vulnerabilities in the Micodus MV720, a GPS tracker that sells for about $20 and is widely available. The researchers who performed the assessment believe the same critical vulnerabilities are present in other Micodus tracker models. The …
Some sites, including Facebook, add parameters to the web address for tracking purposes. These parameters have no functionality that is relevant to the user, but sites rely on them to track users across pages and properties. Mozilla introduced support for URL stripping in Firefox 102, which it launched in …
We’ve always known that phones—and the people carrying them—can be uniquely identified from their Bluetooth signatures, and that we need security techniques to prevent that. This new research shows that that’s not enough. Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego proved in a …
Apple Mail now blocks email trackers by default. Most email newsletters you get include an invisible “image,” typically a single white pixel, with a unique file name. The server keeps track of every time this “image” is opened and by which IP address. This quirk of internet history means …
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Last year, Apple enacted App Tracking Transparency, a mandatory policy that forbids app makers from tracking user activity across other apps without first receiving those users’ explicit permission. Privacy advocates praised the initiative, and Facebook warned it would spell certain doom for companies that rely …
Ever since Apple introduced AirTags, security people have warned that they could be used for stalking. But while there have been a bunch of anecdotal stories, this is the first vaguely scientific survey: Motherboard requested records mentioning AirTags in a recent eight month period from dozens of the country …
The malicious uses of these technologies are scary : Police reportedly arrived on the scene last week and found the man crouched beside the woman’s passenger side door. According to the police, the man had, at some point, wrapped his Apple Watch across the spokes of the woman’s …
A Berlin-based company has developed an AirTag clone that bypasses Apple’s anti-stalker security systems. Source code for these AirTag clones is available online. So now we have several problems with the system. Apple’s anti-stalker security only works with iPhones. (Apple wrote an Android app that can detect …
This development suprises no one who has been paying attention: Researchers now believe AirTags, which are equipped with Bluetooth technology, could be revealing a more widespread problem of tech-enabled tracking. They emit a digital signal that can be detected by devices running Apple’s mobile operating system. Those devices …
From Ontario and not surprising : Since September 2021, officers have investigated five incidents where suspects have placed small tracking devices on high-end vehicles so they can later locate and steal them. Brand name “air tags” are placed in out-of-sight areas of the target vehicles when they are parked in …
Interesting Twitter thread on how cell phone metadata can be used to identify and track people who don’t want to be identified and tracked. [...]
Vice has a detailed article about how the FBI gets data from cell phone providers like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, based on a leaked (I think) 2019 139-page presentation. [...]
Good article about the current state of cryptocurrency forensics. [...]
Yet another article on the privacy risks of static MAC addresses and always-on Bluetooth connections. This one is about wireless headphones. The good news is that product vendors are fixing this: Several of the headphones which could be tracked over time are for sale in electronics stores, but according …
Vice has an article about how data brokers sell access to the Internet backbone. This is netflow data. It’s useful for cybersecurity forensics, but can also be used for things like tracing VPN activity. At a high level, netflow data creates a picture of traffic flow and volume …