privacy

I'm not familiar with them personally, and don't plan to switch away from Signal anytime soon, but this might help anyone that was looking into Threema :)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/15995282

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/48995777

Le Monde reports that confidential movements of powerful leaders like Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris could be tracked through a fitness app used by their bodyguards.

There was another thread with a paywalled article, but here’s the actual study that found that smart TVs use “automatic content recognition” to build an ad profile for you based on what’s on your screen… including HDMI content streamed from a laptop, game console, etc. Yikes.

Leak on latest #ChatControl attempt (in German): netzpolitik.org/…/interne-dokumente-sperrminorita… +++ Only AUT, DEU, EST, LUX, POL, SVN were critical – no blocking minority! +++ BEL, CZE, FIN, ITA, NLD, PRT, SWE undecided +++ EU legal experts confirm violation of our fundamental rights +++ Only 5 days to next discussion +++

New EU #ChatControl proposal leaked +++ Governments to position themselves by 23 September, will be very tight… +++ Will messenger services be blocked in Europe? patrick-breyer.de/…/new-eu-push-for-chat-control-…

🇬🇧🚨#ChatControl is back on the agenda: As soon as next Wednesday representatives of EU governments will resume work based on a secret document. consilium.europa.eu/…/public-register-search/?Doc…

#ALTtext: A screenshot capture shows the cookies settings popup window of a current website. The first sentence of the popup starts: “We and our 843 partners store and access personal data…” The screenshot is annotated. “843 partners” is highlighted with “Is that all?” written beside it

Some significant news for Telegram users!

Google representatives gave ad buyers tips on how they could reach teens, even though the company bars targeted advertisements to users under the age of 18 based on their demographics, according to a report from Adweek.

https://github.com/umutcamliyurt/FaradayTester

The post is in the link, the article with more background info is here (it cites the mastodon post): https://www.androidauthority.com/custom-roms-vs-google-3469378/

https://archive.is/tc2xB

Abandoned luggage and unexpected crowds - real-time cameras will use artificial intelligence (AI) to detect suspicious activity on the streets of Paris during next summer's Olympics. But civil rights groups say the technology is a threat to civil liberties, as the BBC's Hugh Schofield reports.

One Monday morning in May, I woke up and grabbed my cell phone to read the news and scroll through memes. But it was out of cell service. I couldn’t make calls or texts.

Italy’s competition and consumer watchdog has announced an investigation into how Google gets users’ consent in order to link their activity across different services for ad profiling, saying it suspects the adtech giant of “unfair commercial practices.”

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: Click here to see the summaryThis is the best summary I could come up with: Unlike many competitors, its default is end-to-end encryption — and on top of that, the app minimizes the amount of information it stores about users. This makes it a powerful communication tool for those seeking a private and secure means of chatting, whether it’s journalists and their sources, activists and human rights defenders, or just ordinary people who want to evade the rampant data-mining of Big Tech platforms. On a recent visit to Tampa, where I travel annually to discuss security matters and set things on fire, I spotted a pay phone while leaving Busch Gardens. If the number isn’t listed on the phone — it wasn’t in this case — there’s a workaround that doesn’t involve a paper trail leading back to your cellphone. Signal first insists on attempting to send a verification code via an SMS text message, so you have to initially go through that fruitless route. The next and final step was to set up a PIN and enable a registration lock so that someone else wouldn’t be able to take over the account by going to the same pay phone and registering their own version of Signal with that same number. The original article contains 1,172 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

HN Discussion

Google’s Gemini AI has been accused of scanning PDF files hosted on Google Drive without active permission or initiation, sparking yet another discussion around AI safety and privacy concerns.

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: Click here to see the summaryThis is the best summary I could come up with: In the quiet Hill Country town of Comfort, Texas, Airbnb host A. Jay Allee welcomed guests to a rural retreat. The case is part of an ongoing debate about the appropriateness of cameras at short-term rentals, which include rooms and homes listed on Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com. Last year, before the ban, some hosts told Business Insider that they needed cameras for their own security and reassurance that their property wasn't being damaged. Some travelers, however, posted on social media that they feared hosts skirting rules to invade their privacy — even though, at that time, all security cameras had to be disclosed in the listings. "When we do receive an allegation, we take appropriate, swift action, which can include removing hosts and listings that violate the policy," an Airbnb spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider. David Wyzynajtys, who stayed at Allee's property in July 2021, told CNN that discovering the cameras inside the home was the "scariest moment" of his life. The original article contains 406 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: Click here to see the summaryThis is the best summary I could come up with: Additionally, AT&T said that for an undisclosed subset of its records, one or more cell site identification numbers linked to the calls and texts were also exposed. The FBI said AT&T reached out shortly after learning about the hack, but the agency wanted to review the data for potential national security risks. At that time, AT&T said personal information such as Social Security numbers on 73 million current and former customers was released onto the dark web. In the new incident, AT&T told CNN it learned in April that customer data was illegally downloaded from its workspace on Snowflake, a third-party cloud platform. Brad Jones, chief information security officer at Snowflake, told CNN in a separate statement that the company has not found evidence this activity was “caused by a vulnerability, misconfiguration or breach of Snowflake’s platform.” Jones said this has been verified by investigations by third-party cybersecurity experts at Mandiant and CrowdStroke. The company said it’s cooperating with law enforcement’s efforts to apprehend those responsible and understands at least one person has already been arrested. The original article contains 750 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Pakistan has authorised its powerful spy agency to tap phone calls and messages, tightening the army’s grip on the South Asian nation.

The use of selfies to verify identity online is an emerging trend in some parts of the world since the pandemic forced more business to go digital. Some banks – and even governments – have begun requiring live images over Zoom or similar in order to participate in the modern economy. The question must be asked, though: is it cyber smart?

Brazil’s data protection authority (ANPD) has banned Meta from training its artificial intelligence models on Brazilian personal data, citing the “risks of serious damage and difficulty to users.” The decision follows an update to Meta’s privacy policy in May in which the social media giant granted itself permission to use public Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram data from Brazil — including posts, images, and captions — for AI training.

A lawsuit accusing Google of breaking America's child privacy laws will proceed to trial as a judge denied the web goliath's motion to throw out the case.

This was an interview on ABC (Australian public broadcaster) with Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker. It covered some points relevant to the discussions on Signal and encrypted messaging, with a small bit on AI at the end. The original title of the video is bad.

Today EU governments will not adopt their position on the EU regulation on “combating child sexual abuse”, the so-called chat control regulation, as planned, which would have heralded the end of private messages and secure encryption. The Belgian Council presidency postponed the vote at short notice. Once again the chat control proposal fails in Council.

A controversial European Union legislative proposal to scan the private messages of citizens in a bid to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is a risk to the future of web security, Meredith Whittaker warned in a public blog post Monday. She’s the president of the not-for-profit foundation behind the end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging app Signal.

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: Click here to see the summaryThis is the best summary I could come up with: It’s been a rocky couple of months for Sonos — so much so that CEO Patrick Spence now has a canned autoreply for customers emailing him to vent about the redesigned app. But as the company works to right the ship, restore trust, and get the new Sonos Ace headphones off to a strong start, it finds itself in the middle of yet another controversy. Now, some customers, already feeling burned by the new Sonos app’s unsteady performance, are sounding off about what they view as another poor decision from the company’s leadership. As part of its reworked app platform, Sonos rolled out web-based access for all customer systems — giving the cloud an even bigger role in the company’s architecture. Unfortunately, the web app currently lacks any kind of two-factor authentication, which has also irked users; all it takes is an email address and password to remotely control Sonos devices. The app situation is gradually improving — alarms and sleep timers were both recently restored — but getting through to Sonos customer support can still take a very, very long time in the aftermath of the top-to-bottom software overhaul. The original article contains 343 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 45%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/34636917

Last month, Wells Fargo terminated over a dozen bank employees following an investigation into claims of faking work activity on their computers, according to a Bloomberg report.

A few days after EU citizens were called to vote on their next parliamentary representatives, we just have a rough idea of what the upcoming political squad will look like. What is certain, however, is that anti-encryption sentiments are still thriving across the Union.

Meta will start training its AI models using everyone's social media posts though European Union users can opt out, a luxury the rest of the world won't enjoy. The AI training rules kick in worldwide on June 26.

The woman remembers the first time she got a smartphone.

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: Click here to see the summaryThis is the best summary I could come up with: After The New York Times revealed that General Motors was sharing driving behavior with LexisNexis, customers filed dozens of lawsuits and the carmaker ended its contract with the data broker. The scores “look at drivers’ performance behind the wheel, including how often they brake suddenly, speed or use their phones,” according to an Arity blog post aimed at insurance marketers, and can be used to target potential customers based on “10 different risk categories.” Last month, Kathleen Lomax, a New Jersey mother who paid $100 annually for Life360 to track her husband and twin 18-year-old daughters, reached out to the company to ask if it was selling their driving data. A number of factors go into determining it, including credit history, gender, marital status, age, what car you drive and where you live, said Dale Porfilio of the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group. Driving has gotten more dangerous, but the police are giving out fewer tickets, a decline that some attribute to a law enforcement pullback after the pandemic and widespread protests over George Floyd’s death four years ago. “Auto insurance companies use a lot of socioeconomic factors, like your credit score or your job or your education level, like whether you went to high school or to college or whether you’re married.” The original article contains 2,253 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 91%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: Click here to see the summaryThis is the best summary I could come up with: SAN ANTONIO – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating multiple car manufacturing companies after reports that they have secretly collected driver data and sold it to third parties. Paxton’s office said the reports noted that massive amounts of data were sold to insurance providers. “The technology in modern vehicles enables manufacturers to collect millions of data points about the people driving them,” Paxton said. “Recently, consumers have grown extremely concerned that their driving data is being reported to their insurance company without their knowledge or authorization. These reports of the invasive and unmitigated collection and sale of data without consumer consent are disturbing, and they merit a thorough investigation and appropriate enforcement.” Paxton’s office said the manufacturers and third parties were instructed to show records relevant to their conduct. The original article contains 205 words, the summary contains 130 words. Saved 37%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: Click here to see the summaryThis is the best summary I could come up with: Microsoft had originally planned to turn Recall on by default, but the company now says it will offer the ability to disable the controversial AI-powered feature during the setup process of new Copilot Plus PCs. Recall uses local AI models to screenshot mostly everything you see or do on your computer and then give you the ability to search and retrieve anything in seconds. Everything in Recall is designed to remain local and private on-device, so no data is used to train Microsoft’s AI models. TotalRecall extracts the Recall database so you can easily view what text is stored and the screenshots that Microsoft’s feature has generated. “In some cases, this will mean prioritizing security above other things we do, such as releasing new features or providing ongoing support for legacy systems.” Davuluri references Microsoft’s SFI principles in today’s response, noting that the company is taking action to improve Recall security. The original article contains 747 words, the summary contains 151 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!