December 9, 2023

Ars Technica: Verizon fell for fake “search warrant,” gave victim’s phone data to stalker

Ars Technica: Verizon fell for fake “search warrant,” gave victim’s phone data to stalker. “Verizon Wireless gave a female victim’s address and phone logs to an alleged stalker who pretended to be a police officer, according to an affidavit filed by an FBI special agent. The man, Robert Michael Glauner, was later arrested near the victim’s home and found to be carrying a knife at the time, according to the affidavit submitted in court yesterday.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
December 8, 2023

Reuters: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications -US senator

Reuters: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications -US senator. “Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users via their apps’ push notifications, a U.S. senator warned on Wednesday. In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Alphabet’s Google and Apple. Although details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
November 27, 2023

Rolling Stone: We Spied on Trump’s ‘Southern White House’ From Our Couches

Rolling Stone: We Spied on Trump’s ‘Southern White House’ From Our Couches. “We didn’t have to risk life and limb, posing as the help and smuggling information out through a well-funded spy ring. All we had to do was sign up for an online service, enter the address of Mar-a-Lago, and click a button. Within a few minutes, we had a report profiling thousands of visitors to Trump’s club over the course of an entire year, including details like where they likely live and work, their ages, incomes, ethnicities, education levels, where they were immediately before visiting, and where they spent their time on the property once they got there.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
October 30, 2023

WashU Expert: Your smart speaker data is used in ways you might not expect (Washington University in St. Louis)

Washington University in St. Louis: WashU Expert: Your smart speaker data is used in ways you might not expect. “We’ve all had the uncanny experience of searching for something on the internet and then suddenly ads for that very thing are popping up everywhere we look online. It’s no coincidence, said Umar Iqbal, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
October 16, 2023

Wall Street Journal: How Ads on Your Phone Can Aid Government Surveillance

Wall Street Journal: How Ads on Your Phone Can Aid Government Surveillance. “A recent U.S. intelligence-community report said the data collected by consumer technologies expose sensitive information on everyone ‘in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid.’ The Wall Street Journal identified a network of brokers and advertising exchanges whose data was flowing from apps to Defense Department and intelligence agencies through a company called Near Intelligence NIR.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
May 26, 2023

The cyber gulag: How Russia tracks, censors and controls its citizens (Associated Press)

Associated Press: The cyber gulag: How Russia tracks, censors and controls its citizens. “Rights advocates say that Russia under President Vladimir Putin has harnessed digital technology to track, censor and control the population, building what some call a ‘cyber gulag’ — a dark reference to the labor camps that held political prisoners in Soviet times. It’s new territory, even for a nation with a long history of spying on its citizens.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
May 5, 2023

Wall Street Journal: TikTok Tracked Users Who Watched Gay Content, Prompting Employee Complaints

Wall Street Journal: TikTok Tracked Users Who Watched Gay Content, Prompting Employee Complaints. “TikTok doesn’t ask users to disclose their sexual orientation, but it cataloged videos users watched under topics such as LGBT, short for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, the former employees said. The collection of information, which could be viewed by some employees through a dashboard, included a set of affiliated users who watched those videos, and their ID numbers, they said.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
January 27, 2023

WIRED: China Is the World’s Biggest Face Recognition Dealer

WIRED: China Is the World’s Biggest Face Recognition Dealer. “EARLY LAST YEAR, the government of Bangladesh began weighing an offer from an unnamed Chinese company to build a smart city on the Bay of Bengal with infrastructure enhanced by artificial intelligence. Construction of the high-tech metropolis has yet to begin, but if it proceeds it may include face recognition software that can use public cameras to identify missing persons or track criminals in a crowd—capabilities already standard in many Chinese cities.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
November 20, 2022

Electronic Frontier Foundation: EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance Database Now Documents 10,000+ Police Tech Programs

Electronic Frontier Foundation: EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance Database Now Documents 10,000+ Police Tech Programs. “With this project, we are creating a searchable and mappable repository of which law enforcement agencies in the U.S. use surveillance technologies such as body-worn cameras, drones, automated license plate readers, and face recognition…. The Atlas of Surveillance has now hit 10,000 data points. It contains at least partial data on approximately 5,500 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states, as well as most territories and districts.”

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