Interesting research: The trick in accurately tracking a person with this method is finding out what kind of activity they’re performing. Whether they’re walking, driving a car, or riding in a train or airplane, it’s pretty easy to figure out when you know what you’re looking for. The sensors can determine how fast a person … Read More “Tracking People Without GPS” »
Category: privacy
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The FDA has approved a pill with an embedded sensor that can report when it is swallowed. The pill transmits information to a wearable patch, which in turn transmits information to a smartphone. Powered by WPeMatico
The cell phones we carry with us constantly are the most perfect surveillance device ever invented, and our laws haven’t caught up to that reality. That might change soon. This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case with profound implications on your security and privacy in the coming years. The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of … Read More “Warrant Protections against Police Searches of Our Data” »
This digital security guide by Motherboard is very good. I put alongside EFF’s “Surveillance Self-Defense” and John Scott-Railton’s “Digital Security Low Hanging Fruit.” There’s also “Digital Security and Privacy for Human Rights Defenders.” There are too many of these…. Powered by WPeMatico
The Norwegian Consumer Council has published a report detailing a series of security and privacy flaws in smart watches marketed to children. Press release. News article. This is the same group that found all those security and privacy vulnerabilities in smart dolls. Powered by WPeMatico
Two related stories: PornHub is using machine learning algorithms to identify actors in different videos, so as to better index them. People are worried that it can really identify them, by linking their stage names to their real names. Facebook somehow managed to link a sex worker’s clients under her fake name to her real … Read More “Technology to Out Sex Workers” »
Interesting survey paper: on the privacy implications of e-mail tracking: Abstract: We show that the simple act of viewing emails contains privacy pitfalls for the unwary. We assembled a corpus of commercial mailing-list emails, and find a network of hundreds of third parties that track email recipients via methods such as embedded pixels. About 30% … Read More “E-Mail Tracking” »
Under European law, service providers like Tinder are required to show users what information they have on them when requested. This author requested, and this is what she received: Some 800 pages came back containing information such as my Facebook “likes,” my photos from Instagram (even after I deleted the associated account), my education, the … Read More “The Data Tinder Collects, Saves, and Uses” »
New York Times reporter Charlie Savage writes about some bad statistics we’re all using: Among surveillance legal policy specialists, it is common to cite a set of statistics from an October 2011 opinion by Judge John Bates, then of the FISA Court, about the volume of internet communications the National Security Agency was collecting under … Read More “What the NSA Collects via 702” »
Last Thursday, Equifax reported a data breach that affects 143 million US customers, about 44% of the population. It’s an extremely serious breach; hackers got access to full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, driver’s license numbers — exactly the sort of information criminals can use to impersonate victims to banks, credit card companies, … Read More “On the Equifax Data Breach” »