A report (PDF), released today by Big Brother Watch and eight other civil rights groups, has argued that complainants are being subjected to “suspicion-less, far-reaching digital interrogations when they report crimes to police”. It added: “Our research shows that these digital interrogations have been used almost exclusively for complainants of rape and serious sexual offences Read more about UK cops want years of data from victims phones for no real reason, but it is being misused[…]

Researchers at Imperial College London published a paper in Nature Communications on Tuesday that explored how inadequate current techniques to anonymize datasets are. Before a company shares a dataset, they will remove identifying information such as names and email addresses, but the researchers were able to game this system. Using a machine learning model and Read more about Researchers Reveal That Anonymized Data Is Easy To Reverse Engineer[…]

Being able to access porn on the internet might be convenient, but according to researchers it’s not without its security risks. And they’re not just talking about viruses. Researchers at Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 22,484 porn sites and found that 93% leak user data to a third party. Normally, Read more about Google and Facebook might be tracking your porn history, researchers warn[…]

Android app developers intentionally delayed updating their applications to work on top of Android 6.0, so they could continue to have access to an older permission-requesting mechanism that granted them easy access to large quantities of user data, research published by the University of Maryland last month has revealed. The central focus of this research Read more about Permission-greedy apps delayed Android 6 upgrade so they could harvest more user data[…]

Schools in the central German state of Hesse have been have been told it’s now illegal to use Microsoft Office 365. The state’s data-protection commissioner has ruled that using the popular cloud platform’s standard configuration exposes personal information about students and teachers “to possible access by US officials”. That might sound like just another instance Read more about Microsoft Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears[…]

Through a public record request, Motherboard has obtained a user manual that gives unprecedented insight into Palantir Gotham (Palantir’s other services, Palantir Foundry, is an enterprise data platform), which is used by law enforcement agencies like the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. The NCRIC serves around 300 communities in northern California and is what is Read more about Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops shows how easily they can find scary amounts of information on you and your friends[…]

Google admitted on Thursday that more than 1,000 sound recordings of customer conversations with the Google Assistant were leaked by some of its partners to a Belgian news site. […] “We just learned that one of these language reviewers has violated our data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data,” Google product manager of Read more about Google admits leaked private voice conversations, decides to clamp down on whistleblowers, not improve privacy[…]

Not only is your Google Home device listening to you, a new report suggests there might be a Google contractor who’s listening as well. Even if you didn’t ask your device any questions, it’s still sending what you say to the company, who allow an actual person to collect data from it. […] VRT, with Read more about Google contractors are secretly listening to your Assistant and Home recordings[…]

An industry group of internet service providers has branded Firefox browser maker Mozilla an “internet villain” for supporting a DNS security standard. The U.K.’s Internet Services Providers’ Association (ISPA), the trade group for U.K. internet service providers, nominated the browser maker for its proposed effort to roll out the security feature, which they say will Read more about Internet group brands Mozilla ‘internet villain’ for supporting DNS privacy feature which may also allow users access to porn in the UK, make it hard for the great filter there to see where everyone is surfing[…]

Before Google, Facebook and Amazon, tech dominance was known by a single name: Microsoft. And no product was more dominant than Microsoft’s web browser, Internet Explorer. The company’s browser was the gateway to the internet for about 95 percent of users in the early 2000s, which helped land Microsoft at the center of a major Read more about Privacy-first browsers look to take the shine off Google’s Chrome[…]

Google and other tech companies have been under fire recently for a variety of issues, including failing to protect user data, failing to disclose how data is collected and used and failing to police the content posted to their services. […] n May, I wrote up something weird I spotted on Google’s account management page. Read more about Google Gmail purchase history can’t be deleted[…]

Almost a third (30%) of the world’s top virtual private network (VPN) providers are secretly owned by six Chinese companies, according to a study by privacy and security research firm VPNpro. The study shows that the top 97 VPNs are run by just 23 parent companies, many of which are based in countries with lax Read more about Top VPNs secretly owned by Chinese firms[…]

Slack is one of many Silicon Valley unicorns going public this year, but it’s the only one that has admitted it is at risk for nation-state attacks. In the S-1 forms filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Uber, Lyft, Pinterest and Snapchat addressed threats that could lower the price of their stock — including Read more about What if All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?[…]

A former patient at the University of Chicago Medical Center is suing UChicago, the medical center, and Google, accusing them of violating the privacy rights of patients at UChicago Medicine through the sharing of patient records containing identifiable information. The class action lawsuit, filed by Matt Dinerstein in the Northern District of Illinois on Wednesday, claims Read more about UChicago and Google Sued in Federal Class Action Suit for Patient Data Sharing between 2009 – 2016[…]

Next time you use Amazon Alexa to message a friend or order a pizza, know that the record could be stored indefinitely, even if you ask to delete it. In May, Delaware Senator Chris Coons sent Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos a letter asking why Amazon keeps transcripts of voices captured by Echo devices, citing privacy Read more about Amazon Confirms It Keeps Alexa Transcripts You Can’t Delete[…]

The authority on personal data has reprimanded the ING Bank over plans to use payment data for advertising. The authority has told other banks to examine their policies for direct marketing. ING Bank recently changed their privacy statement, stating that the bank will use payment data for direct marketing offers. As an example they said Read more about Dutch ING Bank wants to use customer payment data for direct marketing, privacy watchdog says NO! whilst Dutch Gov wants more banking data sharing with everyone![…]

Superhuman is one of the most talked about new apps in Silicon Valley. Why? The product — a $30 per month email app for power users hoping for greater productivity— is a good alternative to many popular and stale email apps, nearly everyone who has used it says so. Even better is the company’s publicity Read more about Silicon Valley’s Hottest Email App Superhuman sends emails that track you and your location without your knowledge[…]

The New York Times reported today that guards working the border with Krygyzstan in the Xinjiang region have insisted on putting an app called Fengcai on the Android devices of visitors – including tourists, journalists, and other foreigners. The Android app is said to harvest details from the handset ranging from text messages and call Read more about We are shocked to learn that China, an oppressive surveillance state, injects spyware into visitors’ phones[…]

According to tech statistics website Built With, more than 650,000 websites are already using reCaptcha v3; overall, there are at least 4.5 million websites use reCaptcha, including 25% of the top 10,000 sites. Google is also now testing an enterprise version of reCaptcha v3, where Google creates a customized reCaptcha for enterprises that are looking Read more about Google’s new reCaptcha forces page admins to put it on EVERY page so Google can track you everywhere[…]

If you notice the ads being served to you are eerily similar to stuff you were just browsing online, it’s not all in your head, and it’s the insidious truth of existing online without installing a bunch of browser extensions. But there’s now a tool that, while comically absurd in execution, can stick it to Read more about Mozilla Has a New Tool for Tricking Advertisers Into Believing You’re Filthy Rich[…]

You open your browser to look at the Web. Do you know who is looking back at you? Over a recent week of Web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad Read more about Chrome is the biggest snoop of all on your computer or cell phone – so switch browser before there is no alternative any more[…]

Graduate student Dan Salmon has released online seven million Venmo transfers, scraped from the social payment biz in recent months, to call attention to the privacy risks of public transaction data. Venmo, for the uninitiated, is an app that allows friends to pay each other money for stuff. El Reg‘s Bay Area vultures primarily use Read more about FYI: Your Venmo transfers with those edgy emojis aren’t private by default. And someone’s put 7m of them into a public DB[…]

For The New York Times, Kevin Litman-Navarro plotted the length and readability of privacy policies for large companies: To see exactly how inscrutable they have become, I analyzed the length and readability of privacy policies from nearly 150 popular websites and apps. Facebook’s privacy policy, for example, takes around 18 minutes to read in its Read more about Readability of privacy policies for big tech companies visualised[…]