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 allow users to “bypass UK filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet safety standards in the UK.”

Mozilla said late last year it was planning to test DNS-over-HTTPS to a small number of users.

Whenever you visit a website — even if it’s HTTPS enabled — the DNS query that converts the web address into an IP address that computers can read is usually unencrypted. The security standard is implemented at the app level, making Mozilla the first browser to use DNS-over-HTTPS. By encrypting the DNS query it also protects the DNS request against man-in-the-middle attacks, which allow attackers to hijack the request and point victims to a malicious page instead.

DNS-over-HTTPS also improves performance, making DNS queries — and the overall browsing experience — faster.

But the ISPA doesn’t think DNS-over-HTTPS is compatible with the U.K.’s current website blocking regime.

Under U.K. law, websites can be blocked for facilitating the infringement of copyrighted or trademarked material or if they are deemed to contain terrorist material or child abuse imagery. In encrypting DNS queries, it’s claimed that it will make it more difficult for internet providers to filter their subscribers’ internet access.

The ISPA isn’t alone. U.K. spy agency GCHQ and the Internet Watch Foundation, which maintains the U.K.’s internet blocklist, have criticized the move to roll out encrypted DNS features to the browser.

The ISPA’s nomination quickly drew ire from the security community. Amid a backlash on social media, the ISPA doubled down on its position. “Bringing in DNS-over-HTTPS by default would be harmful for online safety, cybersecurity and consumer choice,” but said it encourages “further debate.”

One internet provider, Andrews & Arnold, donated £2,940 — around $3,670 — to Mozilla in support of the nonprofit. “The amount was chosen because that is what our fee for ISPA membership would have been, were we a member,” said a tweet from the company.

Mozilla spokesperson Justin O’Kelly told TechCrunch: “We’re surprised and disappointed that an industry association for ISPs decided to misrepresent an improvement to decades old internet infrastructure.”

“Despite claims to the contrary, a more private DNS would not prevent the use of content filtering or parental controls in the UK. DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) would offer real security benefits to UK citizens. Our goal is to build a more secure internet, and we continue to have a serious, constructive conversation with credible stakeholders in the UK about how to do that,” he said.

“We have no current plans to enable DNS-over-HTTPS by default in the U.K. However, we are currently exploring potential DNS-over-HTTPS partners in Europe to bring this important security feature to other Europeans more broadly,” he added.

Mozilla isn’t the first to roll out DNS-over-HTTPS. Last year Cloudflare released a mobile version of its 1.1.1.1 privacy-focused DNS service to include DNS-over-HTTPS. Months earlier, Google-owned Jigsaw released its censorship-busting app Infra, which aimed to prevent DNS manipulation.

Mozilla has yet to set a date for the full release of DNS-over-HTTPS in Firefox.

Source: Internet group brands Mozilla ‘internet villain’ for supporting DNS privacy feature | TechCrunch

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 government effort to break up the company.

Almost two decades later, Google’s Chrome now reigns as the biggest browser on the block, and the company is facing challenges similar to Microsoft’s from competitors, as well as government scrutiny.

But Google faces a new wrinkle — a growing realization among consumers that their every digital move is tracked.

“I think Cambridge Analytica acted as a catalyst to get people aware that their data could be used in ways they didn’t expect,” said Peter Dolanjski, the product lead for Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, referring to the scandal in which a political consulting firm obtained data on millions of Facebook users and their friends.

[…]

Web browsers, being the primary way the vast majority of people experience the internet, are a crucial choke point in the digital ecosystem. While the browsers are free to users, the companies that operate them can have an outsized impact on how the internet works — especially if they gain a dominant market position. For a company like Google, which makes most of its money from online advertising, that has meant being able to liberally collect user data. For a nonprofit like Mozilla, more users means the chance to convince developers and other tech companies to adopt their privacy-focused standards.

[…]

Chrome, with more than 60 percent market share worldwide, is yet another source of complaints about Google’s power, after its search engine and advertisement businesses. Last year, Chrome changed the system for logging in to the browser, a move that one researcher said could allow Google to collect data much more easily.

Firefox trails Microsoft in corporate size and influence, but it is pressing other browsers on privacy and playing up its status as a nonprofit. Last month, Firefox changed the initial settings for new users so that third-party tracking “cookies” such as those used for ad purposes are blocked — meaning the default is no tracking.

[…]

A technology columnist at the Post wrote in a scathing review last month that he was switching from Chrome to Firefox, calling Google’s product “a lot like surveillance software.” In a week of desktop websurfing, the columnist, Geoffrey Fowler, wrote that he discovered 11,189 requests for tracker cookies that were blocked by Firefox but would have been allowed by Chrome.

[…]

The browser fight has become heated enough to worry the advertising and media industries. Advertisers have become used to filling up websites with sometimes dozens of “cookies” and other forms of online tracking, and they fear a wider backlash against personalized, data-driven ads.

[…]

For now, there are few signs that Google’s browser dominance will end anytime soon, but the tech industry is riddled with examples of companies that appeared to be invincible just before their fall, including with web browsers.

Source: 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. I noticed that Google uses Gmail to store a list of everything you’ve purchased, if you used Gmail or your Gmail address in any part of the transaction.

If you have a confirmation for a prescription you picked up at a pharmacy that went into your Gmail account, Google logs it. If you have a receipt from Macy’s, Google keeps it. If you bought food for delivery and the receipt went to your Gmail, Google stores that, too.

You get the idea, and you can see your own purchase history by going to Google’s Purchases page.

Google says it does this so you can use Google Assistant to track packages or reorder things, even if that’s not an option for some purchases that aren’t mailed or wouldn’t be reordered, like something you bought a store.

At the time of my original story, Google said users can delete everything by tapping into a purchase and removing the Gmail. It seemed to work if you did this for each purchase, one by one. This isn’t easy — for years worth of purchases, this would take hours or even days of time.

So, since Google doesn’t let you bulk-delete this purchases list, I decided to delete everything in my Gmail inbox. That meant removing every last message I’ve sent or received since I opened my Gmail account more than a decade ago.

Despite Google’s assurances, it didn’t work.

ike a horror movie villain that just won’t die

On Friday, three weeks after I deleted every Gmail, I checked my purchases list.

I still see receipts for things I bought years ago. Prescriptions, food deliveries, books I bought on Amazon, music I purchased from iTunes, a subscription to Xbox Live I bought from Microsoft — it’s all there.

A list of my purchases Google pulled in from Gmail.

Todd Haselton | CNBC

Google continues to show me purchases I’ve made recently, too.

I can’t delete anything and I can’t turn it off.

Source: 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 privacy laws.

Six of these companies are based in China and collectively offer 29 VPN services, but in many cases, information on the parent company is hidden to consumers.

Researchers at VPNpro have pieced together ownership information through company listings, geolocation data, the CVs of employees and other documentation.

In some instances, ownership of different VPNs is split amongst a number of subsidiaries. For example, Chinese company Innovative Connecting owns three separate businesses that produce VPN apps: Autumn Breeze 2018, Lemon Cove and All Connected. In total, Innovative Connecting produces 10 seemingly unconnected VPN products, the study shows.

Although the ownership of a number of VPN services by one company is not unusual, VPNpro is concerned that so many are based in countries with lax or non-existence privacy laws.

For example, seven of the top VPN services are owned by Gaditek, based in Pakistan. This means the Pakistani government can legally access any data without a warrant and data can also be freely handed over to foreign institutions, according to VPNpro.

The ability to access the data held by VPN providers, the researchers said, could enable governments or other organisations to identify users and their activity online. This potentially puts human rights activists, privacy advocates, investigative journalists and whistleblowers in jeopardy.

This lack of privacy, the study notes, extends to ordinary consumers, who are also coming under greater government surveillance.

“We’re not accusing any of these companies of doing anything underhand. However, we are concerned that so many VPN providers are not fully transparent about who owns them and where they are based,” said Laura Kornelija Inamedinova, research analyst at VPNpro.

Source: 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 malware, phishing, disgruntled employees and denial-of-service attacks — but only Slack explicitly highlighted “nation-states” as a potential threat.

According to Slack’s S-1 form, the company faces threats from “sophisticated organized crime, nation-state, and nation-state supported actors.” The company acknowledges that its security measures “may not be sufficient to protect Slack and our internal systems and networks against certain attacks,” and correctly assesses that it is “virtually impossible” for the company to completely eliminate the risk of a nation-state attack.

But it is possible for Slack to minimize that risk. Or it would be, if Slack gave all its users the ability to decide which information Slack should keep and which information it should delete.

Right now, Slack stores everything you do on its platform by default — your username and password, every message you’ve sent, every lunch you’ve planned and every confidential decision you’ve made. That data is not end-to-end encrypted, which means Slack can read it, law enforcement can request it, and hackers — including the nation-state actors highlighted in Slack’s S-1 — can break in and steal it.

Slack is widely marketed for and used in business settings, so the company’s servers hold a treasure trove of valuable, proprietary information. Slack’s paying enterprise customers do have a way to mitigate their security risk — they can change their settings to set shorter retention periods and automatically delete old messages — but it’s not just big companies that are at risk.

Slack’s users include community organizers, political organizations, journalists and unions. At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I work, we collaborate with activists, reporters and others on their digital privacy and security, and we’ve noticed these users increasingly gravitating toward Slack’s free product.

And that’s what makes the company’s warning to investors particularly alarming: Free customer accounts don’t allow for any changes to data retention. Instead, Slack retains all of your messages but makes only the most recent 10,000 visible to you. Everything beyond that 10,000-message limit remains on Slack’s servers. So while those messages might seem out of sight and out of mind, they are all still indefinitely available to Slack, law enforcement and third-party hackers.

Source: Opinion | What if All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked? – The New York Times

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 that UChicago violated federal law protecting patient privacy in its partnership with Google to share records of patients from 2009 to 2016. It also claims that Google will be able to use the patient data to develop highly lucrative health-care technologies.

The suit charges that the University breached contracts between UChicago and its patients by allegedly falsely claiming to patients that it would be protecting their medical records. It also charges UChicago for violating an Illinois law dictating that companies cannot engage in deceptive practices with clients.

UChicago spokesperson Jeremy Manier said in a statement e-mailed to The Maroon, “The claims in this lawsuit are without merit. The University of Chicago Medical Center has complied with the laws and regulations applicable to patient privacy.”

“The Medical Center entered into a research partnership with Google as part of the Medical Center’s continuing efforts to improve the lives of its patients,” the statement continues. “That research partnership was appropriate and legal and the claims asserted in this case are baseless and a disservice to the Medical Center’s fundamental mission of improving the lives of its patients. The University and the Medical Center will vigorously defend this action in court.”

A Google spokesperson said in a statement e-mailed to The Maroon, “We believe our healthcare research could help save lives in the future, which is why we take privacy seriously and follow all relevant rules and regulations in our handling of health data.”

UChicago announced in 2017 that it would begin sharing electronic medical records with Google in a partnership to develop machine-learning techniques that could improve the quality of health services. At the time, UChicago said that Google would ensure that “patient data is kept private and secure,” and would be “strictly following HIPAA privacy rule.”

HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is a federal law mandating that shared patient information must be “de-identified”—stripped of any identifying information such as addresses and photos—to protect patients’ privacy.

The complaint accuses UChicago of making insufficient efforts to scrub patient-identifying data before handing over documents.

Though UChicago and Google claim to have de-identified patients, UChicago’s inclusion of timestamps indicating when patients checked in and out of the medical center makes the records identifiable and thereby violate HIPAA, the suit alleges. It cites an article published last year by Google and researchers from collaborating universities that says, “All EHRs [medical records] were de-identified, except that dates of service were maintained in the UCM [UChicago Medicine] dataset.”

Google’s potential capability to “re-identify” patients with its advanced data mining technologies indicates that “these records were not sufficiently anonymized and put the patients’ privacy at grave risk,” the complaint claims. It notes Google’s possession of geolocation information that can “pinpoint and match exactly when certain people entered and exited the University’s hospital.”

UChicago is not the only university to share health records with Google; other universities with similar partnerships include Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco, according to the article published by Google and collaborating researchers. Wednesday’s lawsuit rests on the fact that UChicago’s records, as obtained by Google, include timestamps of patient records.

The suit also argues that Google’s acquisition of a British startup called DeepMind in 2014 has allowed Google to possess robust machine-learning technologies that would allow Google to connect medical records to Google users’ data.

DeepMind and Google obtained health records from the British Royal Free Hospital in 2015. The project was accused by a British watchdog organization for not complying with data protection law, the suit claims.

Source: UChicago and Google Sued in Federal Class Action Suit for Data Sharing

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 concerns over the practice. He was prompted by reports that Amazon stores the text.

“Unfortunately, recent reporting suggests that Amazon’s customers may not have as much control over their privacy as Amazon had indicated,” Coons wrote in the letter. “While I am encouraged that Amazon allows users to delete audio recordings linked to their accounts, I am very concerned by reports that suggest that text transcriptions of these audio records are preserved indefinitely on Amazon’s servers, and users are not given the option to delete these text transcripts.”

CNET first reported that Amazon’s vice president of public policy, Brian Huseman, responded to the senator on June 28, informing him that Amazon keeps the transcripts until users manually delete the information. The letter states that Amazon works “to ensure those transcripts do not remain in any of Alexa’s other storage systems.”

However, there are some Alexa-captured conversations that Amazon retains, regardless of customers’ requests to delete the recordings and transcripts, according to the letter.

As an example of records that Amazon may choose to keep despite deletion requests, Huseman mentioned instances when customers use Alexa to subscribe to Amazon’s music or delivery service, request a rideshare, order pizza, buy media, set alarms, schedule calendar events, or message friends. Huseman writes that it keeps these recordings because “customers would not want or expect deletion of the voice recording to delete the underlying data or prevent Alexa from performing the requested task.”

The letter says Amazon generally stores recordings and transcripts so users can understand what Alexa “thought it heard” and to train its machine learning systems to better understand the variations of speech “based on region, dialect, context, environment, and the individual speaker, including their age.” Such transcripts are not anonymized, according to the letter, though Huseman told Coons in his letter, “When a customer deletes a voice recording, we delete the transcripts associated with the customer’s account of both of the customer’s request and Alexa’s response.”

Amazon declined to provide a comment to Gizmodo beyond what was included in Huseman’s letter.

In his public response to the letter, Coons expressed concern that it shed light on the ways Amazon is keeping some recordings.

“Amazon’s response leaves open the possibility that transcripts of user voice interactions with Alexa are not deleted from all of Amazon’s servers, even after a user has deleted a recording of his or her voice,” Coons said. “What’s more, the extent to which this data is shared with third parties, and how those third parties use and control that information, is still unclear.”

Source: 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 being able to offer specific product offers after child support payments had come in. Many ING customers caught this and emailed and called the authority about this angrily.

This is the second time the ING has tried this: in 2014 they tried to do this, but then also sharing the payment data with third parties.

Source: AP: Banken mogen betaalgegevens niet zomaar gebruiken voor reclame – Emerce

In the meantime, the Dutch government is trying to find a way to prohibit cash payments of over EUR 3000,- and insiduously in the same law allowing banks and government to share client banking data more easily.

source: Kabinet gaat contante betaling boven de 3000 euro verbieden

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 strategy: The service invite only and posting on social media is the quickest way to get in the door. So it gets some local buzz, a $33 million dollar investment, bigger blog write-ups and then a New York Times article to top it all off last month.

After a peak, a roller coaster hits a downward slope.

Superhuman was criticized sharply on Tuesday when a blog post by Mike Davidson, previously the VP of design at Twitter, spread widely across social media. The post goes into detail about how one of Superhuman’s powerful features was actually just a run-of-the-mill privacy-violating tracking pixel with an option to turn it off or a notification for the recipient on the other end. If you use Superhuman, you’ll be able to see when someone opened your email, how many times they did it, what device they were using and what location they’re in.

Here’s Davidson:

It is disappointing then that one of the most hyped new email clients, Superhuman, has decided to embed hidden tracking pixels inside of the emails its customers send out. Superhuman calls this feature “Read Receipts” and turns it on by default for its customers, without the consent of its recipients.

Tracking pixels are not new. If you get an email newsletter, for instance, it’s probably got a tracking pixel feeding this kind of data back to advertisers, senders, and a whole host of other trackers interested in collecting everything they can about you.

Let me put it this way: I send an email to your mother. She opens it. Now I know a ton of information about her including her whereabouts without ever her ever being informed or consenting to this tracking. What does this kind of behavior mean for nosy advertisers? What about abusive spouses? A stalker? Pushy salespeople? Intrusive co-workers and bosses?

Davidson sums it up in his blog:

They’ve identified a feature that provides value to some of their customers (i.e. seeing if someone has opened your email yet) and they’ve trampled the privacy of every single person they send email to in order to achieve that. Superhuman never asks the person on the other end if they are OK with sending a read receipt (complete with timestamp and geolocation). Superhuman never offers a way to opt out. Just as troublingly, Superhuman teaches its user to surveil by default. I imagine many users sign up for this, see the feature, and say to themselves “Cool! Read receipts! I guess that’s one of the things my $30 a month buys me.”

Tracking emails is a tried-and-true tactic used by a ton of companies. That doesn’t make it ethical or irreversible. There has been plenty of criticism of the strategy — and there is a technical workaround that we’ll talk about momentarily — but since the tech has been, until now, mainly visible to businesses, the conversation has paled in comparison to some of the other big privacy issues arising in recent years.

Superhuman is a consumer app. It’s targeted at power users, yes, but the potential audience is big and the buzz is real. Combined with the increasing public distaste for privacy violations in the name of building a more powerful app, Twitter has been awash this week and especially on Tuesday with criticism of Superhuman: Why does it need to take so much information without an option or notification?

We emailed Superhuman but did not get a response.

A tracking pixel works by embedding a small and hidden image in an email. The image is able to report back information including when the email is opened and where the reader is located. It’s hidden for a reason: The spy is not trying to ask permission.

If you’re willing to put in a little work, you can spot who among your contacts is using Superhuman by following these instructions.

The workaround is to disable images by default in email. The method varies in different email apps but will typically be located somewhere in the settings.

Apps like Gmail have tried for years to scrub tracking pixels. Marketers and other users sending these tracking tools out have been battling, sometimes successfully, to continue to track Gmail’s billion users without their permission.

In that case, disabling images by default is the only sure-fire way to go. When you do allow images in an email, know that you may be instantly giving up a small fortune of information to the sender — and whoever they’re working with — without even realizing it.

Source: Silicon Valley’s Hottest Email App Raises Ethical Questions About the Future of Email