Depending on where you are when you download your Android apps, it might collect more or less data about you. The apps we downloaded from Google Play also showed differences based on country in their security and privacy capabilities. One hundred twenty-seven apps varied in what the apps were allowed to access on users’ mobile … Read More “Differences in App Security/Privacy Based on Country” »
Category: privacy
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The Washington Post is reporting that the US Customs and Border Protection agency is seizing and copying cell phone, tablet, and computer data from “as many as” 10,000 phones per year, including an unspecified number of American citizens. This is done without a warrant, because “…courts have long granted an exception to border authorities, allowing … Read More “Large-Scale Collection of Cell Phone Data at US Borders” »
TheMarkup has an extensive analysis of connected vehicle data and the companies that are collecting it. The Markup has identified 37 companies that are part of the rapidly growing connected vehicle data industry that seeks to monetize such data in an environment with few regulations governing its sale or use. While many of these companies … Read More “Surveillance of Your Car” »
Amazon has revealed that it gives police videos from its Ring doorbells without a warrant and without user consent. Ring recently revealed how often the answer to that question has been yes. The Amazon company responded to an inquiry from US Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), confirming that there have been 11 cases in 2022 where … Read More “Ring Gives Videos to Police without a Warrant or User Consent” »
Surely no one could have predicted this: The new proposal—championed by Mayor London Breed after November’s wild weekend of orchestrated burglaries and theft in the San Francisco Bay Area—would authorize the police department to use non-city-owned security cameras and camera networks to live monitor “significant events with public safety concerns” and ongoing felony or misdemeanor … Read More “San Francisco Police Want Real-Time Access to Private Surveillance Cameras” »
This is an excellent essay outlining the post-Roe privacy threat model. (Summary: period tracking apps are largely a red herring.) Taken together, this means the primary digital threat for people who take abortion pills is the actual evidence of intention stored on your phone, in the form of texts, emails, and search/web history. Cynthia Conti-Cook’s … Read More “Post-Roe Privacy” »
Report by Georgetown’s Center on Privacy and Technology published a comprehensive report on the surprising amount of mass surveillance conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Our two-year investigation, including hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and a comprehensive review of ICE’s contracting and procurement records, reveals that ICE now operates as a domestic … Read More “Ubiquitous Surveillance by ICE” »
We’ve always known that phones—and the people carrying them—can be uniquely identified from their Bluetooth signatures, and that we need security techniques to prevent that. This new research shows that that’s not enough. Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego proved in a study published May 24 that minute imperfections in phones caused … Read More “Tracking People via Bluetooth on Their Phones” »
Today is the second day of the fifteenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, hosted by Ross Anderson and Alice Hutchings at the University of Cambridge. After two years of having this conference remotely on Zoom, it’s nice to be back together in person. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various … Read More “Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2022” »
A surprising number of websites include JavaScript keyloggers that collect everything you type as you type it, not just when you submit a form. Researchers from KU Leuven, Radboud University, and University of Lausanne crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites, looking at scenarios in which a user is visiting a site while in the … Read More “Websites that Collect Your Data as You Type” »