Apple said on Thursday that it will delay until early next year changes to its privacy policy that could reduce ad sales by Facebook and other companies targeting users on iPhones and iPads. From a report: The delay could benefit Facebook, which last week said the changes to the iOS 14 operating system would render one of its mobile advertising tools…
Tag: privacy policy
New York Bans Use of Facial Recognition In Schools Statewide
The New York legislature today passed a moratorium banning the use of facial recognition and other forms of biometric identification in schools until 2022. VentureBeat reports: The bill, which has yet to be signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo, appears to be the first in the nation to explicitly regulate the use of the technologies in schools and comes in response to…
VPN With ‘Strict No-Logs Policy’ Exposed Millions of User Log Files
New submitter kimmmos shares a report from BetaNews: An unprotected database belonging to the VPN service UFO VPN was exposed online for more than two weeks. Contained within the database were more than 20 million logs including user passwords stored in plain text. User of both UFO VPN free and paid services are affected by the data breach which was discovered…
Mobilewalla Used Cellphone Data To Estimate the Demographics of Protesters
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: On the weekend of May 29, thousands of people marched, sang, grieved, and chanted, demanding an end to police brutality and the defunding of police departments in the aftermath of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. They marched en masse in cities like Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles, and…
North Dakota’s COVID-19 App Has Been Sending Data To Foursquare and Google
The official COVID-19 contact-tracing app for the state of North Dakota, designed to detect whether people have potentially been exposed to the coronavirus, sends location data and a unique user identifier to Foursquare — and other data to Google and a bug-tracking company — according to a new report from smartphone privacy company Jumbo Privacy. From a report: The app, called…
Austrian Citizen Files GDPR Legal Complaint Over Android Advertising ID
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Privacy pressure group Noyb has filed a legal complaint against Google on behalf of an Austrian citizen, claiming the Android Advertising ID on every Android device is “personal data” as defined by the EU’s GDPR and that this data is illegally processed. Based in Vienna, Austria, Noyb is a nonprofit founded by…
Malwarebytes Releases New VPN Service For Windows
The popular anti-malware software MalwareBytes is releasing a new Windows VPN service called Malwarebytes Privacy. The company says it plans on offering Mac, iOS, Android, and ChromeOS versions in the future. Bleeping Computer reports: During our tests yesterday, you could select from 10 states in the USA and 30 countries around the world. […] Malwarebytes told BleepingComputer that this is not…
Stripe Is Silently Recording Your Movements On Its Customers’ Websites
Michael Lynch, blogger and former software engineer at Microsoft and Google, discovered that the payment processing platform Stripe and its official JavaScript library records all browsing activity on its customers’ websites and reports it back to the company. Lynch says this data includes the following: 1. Every URL the user visits on my site, including pages that never display Stripe payment…
Doc Searls: ‘Zoom Needs to Clean Up Its Privacy Act’
The former editor-in-chief of the Linux Journal just published an annotated version of Zoom’s privacy policy. Searls calls it “creepily chummy with the tracking-based advertising biz (also called adtech).
I’ll narrow my inquiry down to the “Does Zoom sell Personal Data?” section of the privacy policy, which was last updated on March 18. The section runs two paragraphs, and I’ll comment on…
Wacom Drawing Tablets Track the Name of Every Application That You Open
Software engineer Robert Heaton writes: Last week I set up my tablet on my new laptop. As part of installing its drivers I was asked to accept Wacom’s privacy policy. Being a mostly-normal person I never usually read privacy policies. Instead I vigorously hammer the “yes” button in an effort to reach the game, machine, or medical advice on the other…