privacy and security - Page 19

As many as 50 malicious apps were discovered to have bypassed Google’s security checks and were available for download on the Google Play store, leading to many millions of installs on Android devices.

Social media giant Facebook recently admitted to storing millions of Instagram users passwords as easily accessible plain text, making them easy to view for employees or others who accessed Facebook’s systems.

While many users may be careful checking their privacy settings on social media sites, some forget to check the privacy settings of platforms such as YouTube — here are the important steps to protect your YouTube account privacy and make sure strangers aren’t keeping an eye on your video watching habits.

A former student at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, destroyed nearly $60,000 worth of computers with a USB device that instantly kills computers.

Apple has long claimed to be the most privacy-conscious tech firm in Silicon Valley, but with companies like Google handing over data from iPhones to law enforcement, Apple’s privacy promises may prove useless.

A BuzzFeed journalist recently used a Facebook transparency tool to investigate the sort of companies utilizing her data for advertising, finding her personal data was “everywhere” with “no control.” BuzzFeed News reporter Katie Notopoulos recently investigated the sort of personal details that

A report from Bloomberg News claims that Amazon workers are listening to your conversations with your Alexa device.

Tech giant Facebook has caved to pressure from the European Commission and has agreed to revise its terms to better explain how the site utilizes user data to reap massive profits.

The Georgia Institute of Technology announced this week that a data breach compromised personal information from 1.3 million students, faculty, and applicants, including social security numbers.

Facebook is reportedly harvesting its users’ email contacts “without consent,” and asking new users to give their email account passwords to the social network. One security researcher called the practice “indistinguishable to a phishing attack.”

At a recent conference, former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos stated that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has “more data about what people want to do online than anyone else in the world.”

The Ecuadorian embassy in London reportedly locked journalist Cassandra Fairbanks in a room for over an hour during a visit to see WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and was eventually given just under ten minutes to speak with him, despite being booked for a two-hour meeting. Fairbanks reportedly overheard a conversation between Assange and an ambassador during which Assange accused the embassy of illegally surveilling him.

Taiwanese computer hardware company ASUS has confirmed reports claiming that the company was used by hackers to install backdoors on customers’ computers.

Details have been revealed about Mastercard’s controversial “digital identity” system, which will “bind” your identity to a smartphone or other device, and which has been compared to China’s social credit system and the bleak futurism of Netflix series Black Mirror.

Facial recognition systems could result in identified shoplifters being banned from almost every store, according to a report.

According to a recent report, Facebook recently confirmed that it mistakenly stored “hundreds of millions” of users passwords in plaintext without any form of encryption, leaving them vulnerable to hackers, and visible to 20,000 company employees.

House Democrats introduced the Equality Act last week, a measure that would ensure gender ideology — i.e., transgender bathrooms, forced preferred pronoun use, and biological men playing women’s sports, etc. — is cemented into federal law.

Residents of Hells Kitchen in New York City are suing landlords over the introduction of a new security system which requires a smartphone app to enter their apartment building.

In a Scientific American article, titled “The Internet Knows You Better Than Your Spouse Does,”  author Frank Luerweg revealed that an online test, which tracks users’ digital footprints to provide a detailed personality analysis, knew many of those tested better than their spouses.

Software giant Oracle has accused Google of spying on millions of people and developing profiles containing “intimate lifestyle details” of Google users.

Ukrainian hackers reportedly used online quizzes to gain access to private Facebook user data and “inject unauthorized advertisements.”

Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of privacy-based search engine DuckDuckGo, called for privacy legislation in the United States during a hearing on GDPR and CCPA before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Tuesday, explaining how it could create more competition and innovation.

NBC News notes in a recent article that the faces of millions of people are being used without their consent to program facial recognition software that could one day be used to spy on them.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) have proposed a bill which would ban targeted advertising by Big Tech to young children. The goal is an “eraser button” to remove data about children from social media platforms and other Big Tech sites.

An email verification service accidentally leaked more than 800 million email accounts, some including other personal data.

Google has revealed that a recent update to its Chrome web browser includes a fix for a bug which could leave the browser vulnerable to hackers.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he wants to shift the social media giant from “open and connected” to privacy-based, with a focus on keeping private messages secure. Not everyone is convinced, however.

Major apps on Google’s Android smartphones are still reportedly sending data to Facebook, even if the user doesn’t have a Facebook account.

Facebook has opened its users up to security risk, and potential theft, by allowing anyone on the platform to search for others using their phone numbers, which were only given to the social network for two-factor authentication security.

According to a new investigation, almost a dozen iOS apps for iPhones and iPads are sending sensitive personal user data to Facebook.

Popular entertainment app TikTok will pay $5.7 million to the FTC over a children’s privacy complaint, which alleged that the company’s Musical.ly app was collecting data from children under 13 without parental consent.

Leaked Facebook documents including court filings and internal discussions by Facebook employees reveal how the company planned to sell user data for profit.

The Daily Mail reported that home assistants could soon report their owners to the police for breaking the law based on a “Moral A.I.” system, if the ideas of academics in Europe are implemented.

Following recent reports that certain popular apps were sharing sensitive user information with Tesla, at least four of these apps have agreed to stop doing so.

A new study from the Wall Street Journal this week confirmed that third-party applications are providing users’ private information to Facebook, including sensitive health information like menstrual cycles.

Microsoft’s Edge browser reportedly allowed Facebook to “run Adobe Flash code behind users’ backs.”