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” »
Category: privacy
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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” »
San Francisco police are using autonomous vehicles as mobile surveillance cameras. Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm. “This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard. He said cars in general are troves of personal consumer data, but autonomous … Read More “Surveillance by Driverless Car” »
Georgetown has a new report on the highly secretive bulk surveillance activities of ICE in the US: When you think about government surveillance in the United States, you likely think of the National Security Agency or the FBI. You might even think of a powerful police agency, such as the New York Police Department. But … Read More “ICE Is a Domestic Surveillance Agency” »
Apple Mail now blocks email trackers by default. Most email newsletters you get include an invisible “image,” typically a single white pixel, with a unique file name. The server keeps track of every time this “image” is opened and by which IP address. This quirk of internet history means that marketers can track exactly when … Read More “Apple Mail Now Blocks Email Trackers” »
New research: “Are You Really Muted?: A Privacy Analysis of Mute Buttons in Video Conferencing Apps“: Abstract: In the post-pandemic era, video conferencing apps (VCAs) have converted previously private spaces — bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens — into semi-public extensions of the office. And for the most part, users have accepted these apps in their … Read More “Video Conferencing Apps Sometimes Ignore the Mute Button” »