The trade-offs are changing: As countries around the world race to contain the pandemic, many are deploying digital surveillance tools as a means to exert social control, even turning security agency technologies on their own civilians. Health and law enforcement authorities are understandably eager to employ every tool at their disposal to try to hinder … Read More “Privacy vs. Surveillance in the Age of COVID-19” »
Category: tracking
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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” »
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” »
EFF has published a comprehensible and very readable “deep dive” into the technologies of corporate surveillance, both on the Internet and off. Well worth reading and sharing. Boing Boing post. Powered by WPeMatico
Free Wi-Fi hotspots can track your location, even if you don’t connect to them. This is because your phone or computer broadcasts a unique MAC address. What distinguishes location-based marketing hotspot providers like Zenreach and Euclid is that the personal information you enter in the captive portal — like your email address, phone number, or … Read More “Wi-Fi Hotspot Tracking” »
Long Twitter thread about the tracking embedded in modern digital televisions. The thread references three academic papers. Powered by WPeMatico
This article discusses an e-commerce fraud technique in the UK. Because the Royal Mail only tracks packages to the postcode — and not to the address – it’s possible to commit a variety of different frauds. Tracking systems that rely on signature are not similarly vulnerable. Powered by WPeMatico
Yahoo News reported that the Russians have successfully targeted an FBI communications system: American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams. Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor … Read More “Russians Hack FBI Comms System” »
Many GPS trackers are shipped with the default password 123456. Many users don’t change them. We just need to eliminate default passwords. This is an easy win. Powered by WPeMatico
