TorrentFreak surveyed nineteen VPN providers, asking them questions about their privacy practices: what data they keep, how they respond to court order, what country they are incorporated in, and so on. Most interesting to me is the home countries of these companies. Express VPN is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. NordVPN is incorporated in … Read More “VPNs and Trust” »
Category: privacy
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Today is the second day of the fourteenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior. The University of Cambridge is the host, but we’re all on Zoom. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro Acquisti, Ross Anderson, and myself. The … Read More “Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2021” »
Good investigative reporting on how Apple is participating in and assisting with Chinese censorship and surveillance. Powered by WPeMatico
A new draft of an Australian educational curriculum proposes teaching children as young as five cybersecurity: The proposed curriculum aims to teach five-year-old children — an age at which Australian kids first attend school — not to share information such as date of birth or full names with strangers, and that they should consult parents … Read More “Teaching Cybersecurity to Children” »
According to Wired, Signal is adding support for the cryptocurrency MobileCoin, “a form of digital cash designed to work efficiently on mobile devices while protecting users’ privacy and even their anonymity.” Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal and CEO of the nonprofit that runs it, describes the new payments feature as an attempt to extend … Read More “Signal Adds Cryptocurrency Support” »
Interesting research: “Who Can Find My Devices? Security and Privacy of Apple’s Crowd-Sourced Bluetooth Location Tracking System“: Abstract: Overnight, Apple has turned its hundreds-of-million-device ecosystem into the world’s largest crowd-sourced location tracking network called offline finding (OF). OF leverages online finder devices to detect the presence of missing offline devices using Bluetooth and report an … Read More “Security Analysis of Apple’s “Find My…” Protocol” »
Excellent Brookings paper: “Why data ownership is the wrong approach to protecting privacy.” From the introduction: Treating data like it is property fails to recognize either the value that varieties of personal information serve or the abiding interest that individuals have in their personal information even if they choose to “sell” it. Data is not … Read More “The Problem with Treating Data as a Commodity” »
Virginia is about to get a data privacy law, modeled on California’s law. Powered by WPeMatico
The Wall Street Journal has an article about a company called Anomaly Six LLC that has an SDK that’s used by “more than 500 mobile applications.” Through that SDK, the company collects location data from users, which it then sells. Anomaly Six is a federal contractor that provides global-location-data products to branches of the U.S. … Read More “Collecting and Selling Mobile Phone Location Data” »
I just published a new paper with Karen Levy of Cornell: “Privacy Threats in Intimate Relationships.” Abstract: This article provides an overview of intimate threats: a class of privacy threats that can arise within our families, romantic partnerships, close friendships, and caregiving relationships. Many common assumptions about privacy are upended in the context of these … Read More “New Research: “Privacy Threats in Intimate Relationships”” »