Motherboard has a long article on apps — Edison, Slice, and Cleanfox — that spy on your email by scraping your screen, and then sell that information to others: Some of the companies listed in the J.P. Morgan document sell data sourced from “personal inboxes,” the document adds. A spokesperson for J.P. Morgan Research, the … Read More “Companies that Scrape Your Email” »
Category: surveillance
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Last month, engineers at Google published a very curious privacy bug in Apple’s Safari web browser. Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a feature designed to reduce user tracking, has vulnerabilities that themselves allow user tracking. Some details: ITP detects and blocks tracking on the web. When you visit a few websites that happen to load the … Read More “Apple’s Tracking-Prevention Feature in Safari has a Privacy Bug” »
The Norwegian Consumer Council has published an extensive report about how the adtech industry violates consumer privacy. At the same time, it is filing three legal complaints against six companies in this space. From a Twitter summary: 1. [thread] We are filing legal complaints against six companies based on our research, revealing systematic breaches to … Read More “New Research on the Adtech Industry” »
To comply with California’s new data privacy law, companies that collect information on consumers and users are forced to be more transparent about it. Sometimes the results are creepy. Here’s an article about Ralphs, a California supermarket chain owned by Kroger: …the form proceeds to state that, as part of signing up for a rewards … Read More “Customer Tracking at Ralphs Grocery Store” »
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the corporate surveillance operations from the government ones: Google reportedly has a database called Sensorvault in which it stores location data for millions of devices going back almost a decade. The article is about geofence warrants, where the police go to companies like Google and ask for information about every … Read More “Google Receives Geofence Warrants” »
Communities across the United States are starting to ban facial recognition technologies. In May of last year, San Francisco banned facial recognition; the neighboring city of Oakland soon followed, as did Somerville and Brookline in Massachusetts (a statewide ban may follow). In December, San Diego suspended a facial recognition program in advance of a new … Read More “Modern Mass Surveillance: Identify, Correlate, Discriminate” »
The New York Times has a long story about Clearview AI, a small company that scrapes identified photos of people from pretty much everywhere, and then uses unstated magical AI technology to identify people in other photos. His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, … Read More “Clearview AI and Facial Recognition” »
Special Services Group, a company that sells surveillance tools to the FBI, DEA, ICE, and other US government agencies, has had its secret sales brochure published. Motherboard received the brochure as part of a FOIA request to the Irvine Police Department in California. “The Tombstone Cam is our newest video concealment offering the ability to … Read More “Police Surveillance Tools from Special Services Group” »
Lance Vick suggesting that students hack their schools’ surveillance systems. “This is an ethical minefield that I feel students would be well within their rights to challenge, and if needed, undermine,” he said. Of course, there are a lot more laws in place against this sort of thing than there were in — say — … Read More “Hacking School Surveillance Systems” »
The smartphone messaging app ToTok is actually an Emirati spying tool: But the service, ToTok, is actually a spying tool, according to American officials familiar with a classified intelligence assessment and a New York Times investigation into the app and its developers. It is used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to try … Read More “ToTok Is an Emirati Spying Tool” »