Court filings unsealed last week allege Meta created an internal effort to spy on Snapchat in a secret initiative called “Project Ghostbusters.” Meta did so through Onavo, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service the company offered between 2016 and 2019 … Continue reading
Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple … Continue reading
There’s a new menu item in the Facebook app, first reported by TechCrunch on Monday, labeled “Protect.” Clicking it will send you to the App Store and prompt you to download a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service called Onavo. (“Protect” … Continue reading
Apple has removed several apps offering virtual private network (VPN) services from the Russian AppStore, following a request from Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media regulator, independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Thursday. The VPN services removed by Apple include leading services such … Continue reading
NSO Group – sued by Facebook for developing Pegasus spyware that targeted WhatsApp users – this week claimed Facebook tried to license the very same surveillance software to snoop on its own social-media addicts. The Israeli spyware maker’s CEO Shalev … Continue reading
Facebook has been prompting some users registering for the first time to hand over the passwords to their email accounts, the Daily Beast reported on Tuesday—a practice that blares right past questionable and into “beyond sketchy” territory, security consultant Jake … Continue reading
Aleksandra Korolova has turned off Facebook’s access to her location in every way that she can. She has turned off location history in the Facebook app and told her iPhone that she “Never” wants the app to get her location. … Continue reading
In what’s a significant escalation in its censorship efforts, the Turkish government now wants to block the very same tools that tech-savvy citizens use to get around the government-imposed social media blocks. On Friday, the Turkish information technologies and communications … Continue reading
[…]the real kicker is what content is now being gatekept behind invasive age verification systems. Users in the UK now need to submit a selfie or government ID to access: Reddit communities about stopping drinking and smoking, periods, craft beers, … Continue reading
[…] , the Cybernews research team discovered a plethora of supermassive datasets, housing billions upon billions of login credentials. From social media and corporate platforms to VPNs and developer portals, no stone was left unturned. Our team has been closely … Continue reading
A spate of child safety rules might make going online in a few years very different, and not just for kids. In 2022 and 2023, numerous states and countries are exploring age verification requirements for the internet, either as an … Continue reading
Over the weekend, the Indonesian government began the task of blocking any website or service that had failed to register as part of new “internet control” laws. That ended up being a lot, including everything from Steam to the Epic … Continue reading
Note: these numbers do not take into account the amount of secret removal requests from governments, which are probably most in the US (also see https://www.linkielist.com/global-domination/us-judge-rules-twitter-cant-be-transparent-about-amount-of-surveillance-requests-processed-per-year-due-to-national-security-of-the-4th-reich/) In 2009, Google started recording the number of content removal requests it received from … Continue reading
Bug-hunters have told how they uncovered a significant security flaw that affected the likes of Tinder, Yelp, Shopify, and Western Union – and potentially hundreds of millions of folks using these sites and apps. The software sniffers said they first … Continue reading