Rolling Stone is reporting that the UK government has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency to launch an anti-encryption advertising campaign. Presumably they’ll lean heavily on the “think of the children!” rhetoric we’re seeing in this current wave of the crypto wars. The technical eavesdropping mechanisms have shifted to client-side scanning, which won’t actually help … Read More “UK Government to Launch PR Campaign Undermining End-to-End Encryption” »
Category: privacy
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Remember when the US and Australian police surreptitiously owned and operated the encrypted cell phone app ANOM? They arrested 800 people in 2021 based on that operation. New documents received by Motherboard show that over 100 of those phones were shipped to users in the US, far more than previously believed. What’s most interesting to … Read More “Using Foreign Nationals to Bypass US Surveillance Restrictions” »
Some European cell phone carriers, and now T-Mobile, are blocking Apple’s Private Relay anonymous browsing feature. This could be an interesting battle to watch. Slashdot thread. Powered by WPeMatico
DuckDuckGo has had a banner year: And yet, DuckDuckGo. The privacy-oriented search engine netted more than 35 billion search queries in 2021, a 46.4% jump over 2020 (23.6 billion). That’s big. Even so, the company, which bills itself as the “Internet privacy company,” offering a search engine and other products designed to “empower you to … Read More “People Are Increasingly Choosing Private Web Search” »
This development suprises no one who has been paying attention: Researchers now believe AirTags, which are equipped with Bluetooth technology, could be revealing a more widespread problem of tech-enabled tracking. They emit a digital signal that can be detected by devices running Apple’s mobile operating system. Those devices then report where an AirTag has last … Read More “Apple AirTags Are Being Used to Track People and Cars” »
A January 2021 FBI document outlines what types of data and metadata can be lawfully obtained by the FBI from messaging apps. Rolling Stone broke the story and it’s been written about elsewhere. I don’t see a lot of surprises in the document. Lots of apps leak all sorts of metadata: iMessage and WhatsApp seem … Read More “Law Enforcement Access to Chat Data and Metadata” »
I hope this is true: According to Jens Zimmermann, the German coalition negotiations had made it “quite clear” that the incoming government of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the business-friendly liberal FDP would reject “the weakening of encryption, which is being attempted under the guise of the fight against child abuse” by the … Read More “New German Government is Pro-Encryption and Anti-Backdoors” »
Since 2017, someone is running about a thousand — 10% of the total — Tor servers in an attempt to deanonymize the network: Grouping these servers under the KAX17 umbrella, Nusenu says this threat actor has constantly added servers with no contact details to the Tor network in industrial quantities, operating servers in the realm … Read More “Someone Is Running Lots of Tor Relays” »
I received email from two people who told me that Microsoft Edge enabled synching without warning or consent, which means that Microsoft sucked up all of their bookmarks. Of course they can turn synching off, but it’s too late. Has this happened to anyone else, or was this user error of some sort? If this … Read More “Is Microsoft Stealing People’s Bookmarks?” »
Vice has a detailed article about how the FBI gets data from cell phone providers like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, based on a leaked (I think) 2019 139-page presentation. Powered by WPeMatico