A large-scale independent study of pre-installed Android apps has cast a critical spotlight on the privacy and security risks that preloaded software poses to users of the Google developed mobile platform. The researchers behind the paper, which has been published in preliminary form ahead of a future presentation at the IEEE Symposium on Security and […]
Telegram has added a feature that lets a user delete messages in one-to-one and/or group private chats, after the fact, and not only from their own inbox. The new ‘nuclear option’ delete feature allows a user to selectively delete their own messages and/or messages sent by any/all others in the chat. They don’t even have […]
Further details have emerged about when and how much Facebook knew about data-scraping by the disgraced and now defunct Cambridge Analytica political data firm. Last year a major privacy scandal hit Facebook after it emerged CA had paid GSR, a developer with access to Facebook’s platform, to extract personal data on as many as 87 […]
Robert Anderson Contributor Robert Anderson served for 21 years in the FBI, retiring as executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch. He is currently an advisor at The Chertoff Group and the chief executive of Cyber Defense Labs. Over the past several years, the law enforcement community has grown increasingly concerned […]
A study of tracking cookies running on government and public sector health websites in the European Union has found commercial adtech to be operating pervasively even in what should be core not-for-profit corners of the Internet. The researchers used searches including queries related to HIV, mental health, pregnancy, alcoholism and cancer to examine how frequently […]
Facebook on Friday announced a new artificial intelligence-powered tool that it says will help the social network detect revenge porn — the nonconsensually shared intimate images that, when posted online, can have devastating consequences for those who appear in the photos. The technology will leverage both AI and machine learning techniques to proactively detect near-nude […]
Digital identity startup Passbase has bagged $600,000 in pre-seed funding led by a group of business angel investors from Alphabet, Stanford, Kleiner Perkins and EY, as well as seed fund investment from Chicago-based Upheaval Investments and Seedcamp. The 2018-founded Silicon Valley-based startup — whose co-founder we chatted to briefly on camera at Disrupt Berlin — […]
Apple is airing a new ad spot focused on privacy today in primetime. The spot is visually cued, with no dialog and a simple tagline: Privacy. That’s iPhone. In a series of humorous vignettes, the message is driven home that sometimes you just want a little privacy. The spot has only one line of text […]
Messaging platform Telegram claims to have had a surge in signups during a period of downtime for Facebook’s rival messaging services. In a message sent to his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov wrote: “I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.” It’s probably not a coincidence that Facebook […]
As soon as Mark Zuckerberg said in a lengthy 3,225-word blog post to not build data centers in countries with poor human rights, he had already broken his promise. He chose to ignore Singapore, which the Facebook founder had only months earlier posted about, declaring the micro-state home to the company’s first data center in […]