Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard at Vice: The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include…
Tag: location data
Security Holes Opened Back Door To TCL Android Smart TVs
chicksdaddy shares a report from The Security Ledger: Millions of Android smart television sets from the Chinese vendor TCL Technology Group Corporation contained gaping software security holes that researchers say could have allowed remote attackers to take control of the devices, steal data or even control cameras and microphones to surveil the set’s owners. The security holes appear to have been…
CBP Refuses To Tell Congress How It’s Tracking Americans Without a Warrant
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: U.S. Customs and Border Protection is refusing to tell Congress what legal authority the agency is following to use commercially bought location data to track Americans without a warrant, according to the office of Senator Ron Wyden. The agency is buying location data from Americans all over the country, not just in border…
Private Intel Firm Buys Location Data to Track People to their ‘Doorstep’
A threat intelligence firm called HYAS, a private company that tries to prevent or investigates hacks against its clients, is buying location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on peoples’ phones around the world, and using it to unmask hackers. The company is a business, not a law enforcement agency, and claims to be able to track people to their “doorstep.”…
Secret Service Paid To Get Americans’ Location Data Without a Warrant, Documents Show
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A newly released document shows the U.S. Secret Service went through a controversial social media surveillance company to purchase the location information on American’s movements, no warrant necessary. Babel Street is a shadowy organization that offers a product called Locate X that is reportedly used to gather anonymized location data from a host…
The NSA’s Guidelines for Protecting Location Data
American’s National Security Agency (NSA) “has shared new guidance with U.S. military and intelligence personnel, suggesting they take additional precautions to safeguard their location data,” reports Engadget. “The agency argues the information devices and apps collect can pose a national security threat.” Ars Technica reports:
The National Security Agency is recommending that some government workers and people generally concerned about privacy turn…
Millions of Android Phones At Risk Due to ‘Achilles’ Flaw in Qualcomm Chips
“Researchers have found that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip, one of the most widely used in Android phones, has hundreds of bits of vulnerable code that leaves millions of Android users at risk,” reports Gizmodo:
To back up a bit, Qualcomm is a major chip supplier to several well-known tech companies. In 2019, its Snapdragon series of processors could be found on nearly 40%…
US Government Contractor Embedded Software in Apps To Track Phones
A small U.S. company with ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities has embedded its software in numerous mobile apps, allowing it to track the movements of hundreds of millions of mobile phones world-wide, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter and documents it reviewed. From the report: Anomaly Six, a Virginia-based company founded by…
Judge Urged To Release Documents About Google’s Cellphone Tracking
Eight weeks ago Arizona’s attorney general sued Google for allegedly deceiving users about when location data would be collected from their phones, tracking them without their clear consent. . Now an Arizona congressman and more than two dozen researchers from institutions including Yale, MIT, and Cornell are urging a judge to publicly release the documents collected during that investigation: The documents…
Google Promises Privacy With Virus App But Can Still Collection Location Data
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: When Google and Apple announced plans in April for free software to help alert people of their possible exposure to the coronavirus, the companies promoted it as “privacy preserving” and said it would not track users’ locations. Encouraged by those guarantees, Germany, Switzerland and other countries used the code to…