Privacy Badger is a browser extension that automatically blocks hidden third-party trackers that would otherwise follow you around the web and spy on your browsing habits. Privacy Badger now has approximately 900,000 daily users and counting.

Third-party tracking—that is, when advertisers and websites track your browsing activity across the web without your knowledge, control, or consent—is an alarmingly widespread practice in online advertising. Privacy Badger spots and then blocks third-party domains that seem to be tracking your browsing habits (e.g. by setting cookies that could be used for tracking, or by fingerprinting your browser). If the same third-party domain appears to be tracking you on three or more different websites, Privacy Badger will conclude that the third party domain is a tracker and block future connections to it.

Privacy Badger always tells how many third-party domains it has detected and whether or not they seem to be trackers. Further, users have control over how Privacy Badger treats these domains, with options to block a domain entirely, block just cookies, or allow a domain.

Source: The New and Improved Privacy Badger 2.0 Is Here | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Instantly get a list of all your accounts, matched with direct links to delete them

Source: deseat.me

Maps and database of 802.11 wireless networks, with statistics, submitted by wardrivers, netstumblers, and net huggers.

Source: WiGLE: Wireless Network Mapping

Can be used to find the physical address of someone’s wifi ssid

The app update (it’s 3.222.4, for those keeping track) changes the way Uber collects location data from its users. Previously, Uber only collected location information while a user had the app open – now, Uber asks users to always share their location with the ride-hailing company.

Uber says that, even though it can harvest your location constantly while its app is running in the background on your phone, it won’t use that capability. Instead, Uber claims it just needs a little bit more location data to improve its service, and it has to ask for constant access because of the way device-level permissions are structured.

Specifically, Uber wants access to a rider’s location from the moment she requests a ride until five minutes after the driver drops her off, even if the app is not in the foreground of her phone. Previously, Uber would not collect a rider’s background location during the trip, or her location after drop-off.

Source: Uber begins background collection of rider location data | TechCrunch

They have many excuses as to why, but who knows what the truth is? You have become the product of Uber and having them follow you around is just creepy.

While the UK was obsessing with Brexit and its aftermath, parliament quietly passed a contentious snooping law that gives authorities, everyone from police and spies to food regulators, fire officials and tax inspectors, the right to legally look at the internet browsing records of everyone in the country.
[…]
Which government agencies have access to the internet history of any British citizen? Here is the answer courtesy of blogger Chris Yuo, who has compiled the list:

Metropolitan police force
City of London police force
Police forces maintained under section 2 of the Police Act 1996
Police Service of Scotland
Police Service of Northern Ireland
British Transport Police
Ministry of Defence Police
Royal Navy Police
Royal Military Police
Royal Air Force Police
Security Service
Secret Intelligence Service
GCHQ
Ministry of Defence
Department of Health
Home Office
Ministry of Justice
National Crime Agency
HM Revenue & Customs
Department for Transport
Department for Work and Pensions
NHS trusts and foundation trusts in England that provide ambulance services
Common Services Agency for the Scottish Health Service
Competition and Markets Authority
Criminal Cases Review Commission
Department for Communities in Northern Ireland
Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland
Department of Justice in Northern Ireland
Financial Conduct Authority
Fire and rescue authorities under the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004
Food Standards Agency
Food Standards Scotland
Gambling Commission
Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority
Health and Safety Executive
Independent Police Complaints Commissioner
Information Commissioner
NHS Business Services Authority
Northern Ireland Ambulance Service Health and Social Care Trust
Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service Board
Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Regional Business Services Organisation
Office of Communications
Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland
Police Investigations and Review Commissioner
Scottish Ambulance Service Board
Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission
Serious Fraud Office
Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust

Source: These Are The 48 Organizations That Now Have Access To Every Brit’s Browsing History

That’s a lot of places to potentially spill a very important dataset! Remember, they only have to break into one of the above places for it all…

Scientists say they can deduce the lifestyle of an individual, down to the kind of grooming products they use, food they eat and medications they take, from chemicals found on the surface of their mobile phone.

Experts say analysis of someone’s phone could be a boon both to healthcare professionals, and the police.

“You can narrow down male versus female; if you then figure out they use sunscreen then you pick out the [people] that tend to be outdoorsy – so all these little clues can sort of narrow down the search space of candidate people for an investigator,” said Pieter Dorrestein, co-author of the research from the University of California, San Diego.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the US and Germany describe how they swabbed the mobile phone and right hand of 39 individuals and analysed the samples using the highly sensitive technique of mass spectrometry.

The results revealed that each person had a distinct “signature” set of chemicals on their hands which distinguished them from each other. What’s more, these chemicals partially overlapped with those on their phones, allowing the devices to be distinguished from each other, and matched to their owners.

“If one looks at the hands of an individual they are unique in 99% of the samples investigated. In two cases we could not do that perfectly, but in one of those cases people lived together,” said Dorrestein. “In 69% of the cases we could perfectly match up the chemical profile, the molecular profile, on the phone to the person that it belonged to.”

But, he adds, the promise of the technique lies not in identifying individuals, but in building a profile of the phone’s owner.

Analysis of the chemical traces using a reference database allowed the team to match the chemicals to known substances or their relatives to reveal tell-tale clues from each individual’s life – from whether they use hair-loss treatments to whether they are taking antidepressants.

Some of the chemicals, such as the mosquito repellent DEET, were found more than four months after the product was last used by the phone’s owner.

The approach, the authors say, could be extended to produce a wide-ranging database that could be used by police to predict the lifestyle of an individual based on the specific set of trace chemicals found on their phone, keys or other objects.

Source: Chemical traces on your phone reveal your lifestyle, scientists say | Science | The Guardian

According to Facebook, if you send a message to a company, they then have permission to send you sponsored messages—or as we humans call them, ads. These will be unprompted “highly targeted, in-context” ads. Businesses that already have chat bots set up can start using the new feature immediately.

Source: Facebook Will Let Brands Send You Ads If You’ve Messaged Them Before

It seems to me a good reason to not use Facebook to get in touch with a company

In the case of Nvidia, Telemetry gets installed alongside the driver package. While you may — and should — customize the installation of the Nvidia driver so that only the bits that you require are installed, there is no option to disable the Telemetry components from being installed. These do get installed even if you only install the graphics driver itself in the custom installation dialog.

Source: Disable Nvidia Telemetry tracking on Windows – gHacks Tech News

This starts with version 375.70

Come on, who told these companies it was alright to just suck stuff off your machine without consent? And a EULA isn’t consent!

The page tells you they take privacy seriously, but with that I guess they mean they seriously don’t think you should have any. I guess this is the reason it’s only available for OSX or iphone – only Apple people would be dumb enough to send literally all their data to some company.

Source: Atlas Informatics

Images representing 117 million American adults – almost half the grownups in the country – can be found in the facial recognition databases maintained by US law enforcement agencies, according to a study conducted by the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law School.

That figure is expected to grow as facial recognition technology becomes more capable and more commonplace. Yet such systems have very little oversight.
[…]
“Transparency makes a lot of the problems we’ve noticed easier to detect,” said Frankle.

Some of these problems include: the disproportionate representation of African Americans in US law enforcement databases; the potentially chilling effect of facial recognition on free speech; lack of reliable information on the accuracy of facial recognition systems; and unsettled questions about the circumstances under which facial recognition might violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
[…]
At the same time, the utility of the technology remains open to question. Where public data about the efficacy of facial recognition searches exists, it’s not particularly compelling. “Of the FBI’s 36,420 searches of state license photo and mug shot databases, only 210 (0.6 per cent) yielded likely candidates for further investigations,” the study says. “Overall, 8,590 (4 per cent) of the FBI’s 214,920 searches yielded likely matches.”

What’s more, reliable metrics for the accuracy of facial recognition systems are scarce. For example, FaceFirst, facial recognition vendor, advertises “an identification rate above 95 per cent.” The CPT study claims this is misleading and cites a 2015 contract with the San Diego Association of Governments that disclaims any specific success rate: “FaceFirst makes no representations or warranties as to the accuracy and reliability of the product in the performance of its facial recognition capabilities.”
[…]
The study cites a facial recognition test conducted with real-time video in Mainz, Germany, from 2006 to 2007, where accuracy was 60 per cent during the day and 10 to 20 per cent at night.
[…]
“Face recognition can and should be used to respond to serious crimes and public emergencies,” the study concludes. “It should not be used to scan the face of any person, at any time, for any crime.”

Source: Meanwhile, in America: Half of adults’ faces are in police databases

Investigators in Lancaster, Calif., were granted a search warrant last May with a scope that allowed them to force anyone inside the premises at the time of search to open up their phones via fingerprint recognition, Forbes reported Sunday.The government argued that this did not violate the citizens’ Fifth Amendment protection against self incrimination because no actual passcode was handed over to authorities. Forbes was able to confirm with the residents of the building that the warrant was served, but the residents did not give any more details about whether their phones were successfully accessed by the investigators.”I was frankly a bit shocked,” said Andrew Crocker, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), when he learned about the scope of search warrant. “As far as I know, this warrant application was unprecedented.”Crocker said that it’s both the fingerprint lock method and the wide reach of the warrant that are so surprising. Search warrants are typically required to be narrow and clear in scope, but this one was extended to include any phone that happens to be on the property, and all of the private data that that entails. He also described requiring phones to be unlocked via fingerprint, which does not technically count as handing over a self-incriminating password, as a “clever end-run” around constitutional rights.

Source: Using search warrants to get into fingerprint-locked phones

The mysterious Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which oversees Blighty’s snoops, has ruled that the bulk collection of personal data — conducted by GCHQ and MI5 between 1998 and 2015 — was illegal.

Responding to a claim brought by Privacy International, the 70-page judgment handed down this morning [PDF] found that the spooks’ surveillance activities had been taking place without adequate safeguards or supervision for over a decade; and as such were in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

[…]

There are huge risks associated with the use of bulk communications data. It facilitates the almost instantaneous cataloguing of entire populations’ personal data. It is unacceptable that it is only through litigation by a charity that we have learnt the extent of these powers and how they are used.

The public and Parliament deserve an explanation as to why everyone’s data was collected for over a decade without oversight in place and confirmation that unlawfully obtained personal data will be destroyed.

Source: Court finds GCHQ and MI5 engaged in illegal bulk data collection

One win for transparency. Will the UK gov care? Doubt it.

The Breast and Cosmetic Implant Registry (BCIR) is intended to prevent a repeat of faulty Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) silicone breast implants scandal in 2010, in which fraudulently manufactured silicone gel implants affected thousands of women.

Its establishment is in response to recommendation 21 in Sir Bruce Keogh’s Review of the Regulation of Cosmetic interventions, which called for a cosmetic implant registry “to provide better monitoring of patient outcomes and device safety”.

[…]

The registry is expected to record more than 20,000 cases of implant surgery annually. Reporting of data will be done by the provider, via an online portal.

Source: New UK National silicone database will help avoid boobs

This makes no sense whatsoever to me, but for the life of me I can’t understand what other purpose the UK has in collecting such a specific set of surgery data.