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Hundreds have joined a UK class action lawsuit against LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr, seeking damages over a historical case of the company allegedly forwarding users’ HIV status as well as other sensitive data to third-party advertisers.

A total of 670 individuals have joined the class action, filed today in England’s High Court, and lawyers Austen Hays believe the number could rise into the thousands.

The discovery that the data may have been shared with analytics firms led to heavy criticism of the app maker, which at the time didn’t apologize for its alleged role in the furor, but did alter its privacy policy soon after.

Its then-CTO Scott Chen said Grindr would never sell the kind of sensitive data researchers specified to third parties, and reminded users that any information they themselves added to their profile would become public.

In addition to the claim brought to Grindr in the UK, the company is also facing flak in the US, as recently as October 2023, again for alleged data protection failings.

Chaya Hanoomanjee, managing director at Austen Hays and the lawyer leading the UK claim, said: "Our clients have experienced significant distress over their highly sensitive and private information being shared without their consent, and many have suffered feelings of fear, embarrassment, and anxiety as a result.

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In the latest iteration of the neverending (and always head-scratching) crypto wars, Graeme Biggar, the director general of the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), has called on Instagram-owner Meta to rethink its continued rollout of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) — with web users’ privacy and security pulled into the frame yet again.

Currently, as a result of being able to scan message content where E2EE has not been rolled out, Biggar said platforms are sending tens of millions of child-safety related reports a year to police forces around the world — adding a further claim that “on the back of that information we typically safeguard 1,200 children a month and arrest 800 people”.

Pointing out that Meta-owned WhatsApp has had the gold standard encryption as its default for years (E2EE was fully implemented across the messaging platform by April 2016), Robinson wondered if this wasn’t a case of the crime agency trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted?

But, most likely, it’s some form of client-side scanning technology they’re lobbying for — such as the system Apple had been poised to roll out in 2021, for detecting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on users’ own devices, before a privacy backlash forced it to shelve and later quietly drop the plan.

If technology does exist to allow law enforcement to access E2EE data in the plain without harming users’ privacy, as Biggar appears to be claiming, one very basic question is why can’t police forces explain exactly what they want platforms to implement?

In an emailed statement a company spokesperson repeated its defence of expanding access to E2EE, writing: “The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters, and criminals.

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The US Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination does not prohibit police officers from forcing a suspect to unlock a phone with a thumbprint scan, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday.

The ruling does not apply to all cases in which biometrics are used to unlock an electronic device but is a significant decision in an unsettled area of the law.

Judges rejected his claim, holding “that the compelled use of Payne’s thumb to unlock his phone (which he had already identified for the officers) required no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking.”

Payne conceded that “the use of biometrics to open an electronic device is akin to providing a physical key to a safe” but argued it is still a testimonial act because it “simultaneously confirm[s] ownership and authentication of its contents,” the court said.

The Supreme Court “held that this was not a testimonial production, reasoning that the signing of the forms related no information about existence, control, or authenticity of the records that the bank could ultimately be forced to produce,” the 9th Circuit said.

The Court held that this act of production was of a fundamentally different kind than that at issue in Doe because it was “unquestionably necessary for respondent to make extensive use of ‘the contents of his own mind’ in identifying the hundreds of documents responsive to the requests in the subpoena.”

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WordPress.com owner Automattic is acquiring Beeper, the company behind the iMessage-on-Android solution that was referenced by the Department of Justice in its antitrust lawsuit against Apple.

Reached for comment, Automattic said it has started the process of onboarding the Beeper team and is “excited about the progress made” so far but couldn’t yet share more about its organizational updates, or what Bagaria’s new title would be.

But going forward, the Beeper brand will apply to all of the messaging efforts at Automattic,” he said, adding, “Kishan … I’ve known him for years now — there’s not too many other people in the world that are doing what we do — and it was great to be able to combine forces with them.”

The deal, which closed on April 1, represents a big bet from Automattic: that the future of messaging will be open source and will work across services, instead of being tied up in proprietary platforms, like Meta’s WhatsApp or Apple’s iMessage.

Unlike Beeper Mini, which focuses only on iMessage, the main app connects with 14 services, including Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Instagram DM, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Discord, Google Messages and others.

In the meantime, Beeper supports RCS, which solves iMessage to Android problems like low-res images and videos, lack of typing indicators and encryption.

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If approved by a California federal judge, the settlement could apply to 136 million Google users.

The 2020 lawsuit was brought by Google account holders who accused the company of illegally tracking their behavior through the private browsing feature.

Google would need to address data collected in private browsing mode in December 2023 and earlier.

Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement that the company is “pleased to settle this lawsuit, which we always believed was meritless.” Though the plaintiffs valued the proposed settlement at $5 billion, which was the amount they originally sought in damages, Castañeda said that they are “receiving zero.” The settlement does not include damages for the class, though individuals can file claims.

Part of the agreement includes changes to how Google discloses the limits of its private browsing services, which the company has already begun rolling out on Chrome.

Individuals can still file claims for damages in California state court, according to the settlement terms.

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Researchers have found a malicious backdoor in a compression tool that made its way into widely used Linux distributions, including those from Red Hat and Debian.

An update the following day included a malicious install script that injected itself into functions used by sshd, the binary file that makes SSH work.

So-called GIT code available in repositories aren’t affected, although they do contain second-stage artifacts allowing the injection during the build time.

In the event the obfuscated code introduced on February 23 is present, the artifacts in the GIT version allow the backdoor to operate.

“This could break build scripts and test pipelines that expect specific output from Valgrind in order to pass,” the person warned, from an account that was created the same day.

The malicious versions, researchers said, intentionally interfere with authentication performed by SSH, a commonly used protocol for connecting remotely to systems.

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Within minutes of walking through an Israeli military checkpoint along Gaza’s central highway on Nov. 19, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was asked to step out of the crowd.

The expansive and experimental effort is being used to conduct mass surveillance there, collecting and cataloging the faces of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent, according to Israeli intelligence officers, military officials and soldiers.

Surveillance of Hamas in Gaza was instead conducted by tapping phone lines, interrogating Palestinian prisoners, harvesting drone footage, getting access to private social media accounts and hacking into telecommunications systems, Israeli intelligence officers said.

Robert Watts, Corsight’s president, posted this month on LinkedIn that the facial recognition technology could work with “extreme angles, (even from drones,) darkness, poor quality.”

Mr. Abu Toha, the Palestinian poet, was named as a Hamas operative by someone in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia, where he lived with his family, the Israeli intelligence officers said.

In a statement at the time, the Israeli military said Mr. Abu Toha was taken for questioning because of “intelligence indicating a number of interactions between several civilians and terror organizations inside the Gaza Strip.”

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The streaming business’ demise has seemed related to cost cuts at Meta that have also included layoffs.

The letter, made public Saturday, asks a court to have Reed Hastings, Netflix’s founder and former CEO, respond to a subpoena for documents that plaintiffs claim are relevant to the case.

One of the first questions that may come to mind is why a company like Facebook would allow Netflix to influence such a major business decision.

By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users’ private message inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variant (e.g., Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation recipients).

Meta said it rolled out end-to-end encryption “for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook” in December.

The company told Gizmodo that it has standard agreements with Netflix currently but didn’t answer the publication’s specific questions.

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More than half of Americans are using ad blocking software, and among advertising, programming, and security professionals that fraction is more like two-thirds to three-quarters.

More striking are the figures cited for technically savvy users who have worked at least five years in their respective fields – veteran advertisers, programmers, and cybersecurity experts.

“People who know how the internet works – because they work as developers or in security or in advertising – they’ve all over the years decided that it was a good idea to use a tracker blocker or content blocker or adblocker, whatever you call it,” said Jean-Paul Schmetz, CEO of Ghostery, in an interview with The Register.

“It’s pretty unanimous that people who work in this industry and know how these things function want to protect themselves.”

Schmetz said one surprising finding had to do with the extent to which people trust various companies that collect online data.

But truly the best way to support The Register is to sign up for a free account, comment on stories, share our links, and spread the word of our honest independent IT journalism.

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In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers.

On Tuesday, a federal court in California released new documents discovered as part of the class action lawsuit between consumers and Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an email dated June 9, 2016, which was published as part of the lawsuit.

When the network traffic is unencrypted, this type of attack allows the hackers to read the data inside, such as usernames, passwords, and other in-app activity.

This is why Facebook engineers proposed using Onavo, which when activated had the advantage of reading all of the device’s network traffic before it got encrypted and sent over the internet.

“We now have the capability to measure detailed in-app activity” from “parsing snapchat [sic] analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo’s research program,” read another email.

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The UK tech industry has deep concerns over government plans to amend a law dubbed a “snooper’s charter”.

The statement has been signed by more than a dozen bodies and individuals focused on the tech industry and human rights.

In January, Apple told the BBC ministers were seeking to pre-approve new security features introduced by tech firms - something it said amounted to “unprecedented overreach”.

The Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill will make urgent, targeted changes to reflect the reality of modern threats to national security whilst utilising the necessary tools to keep the public safe, underpinned by world-leading safeguards and oversight".

The signatories to the statement include the the Computer and Communications Industry Association, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and the Internet Society, as well as human rights groups such as Liberty and Privacy International.

“We continue reiterating the critical need for rigorous scrutiny, to ensure all concerns are addressed, as is appropriate for a Bill with such significant impacts,” they wrote.

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Produced by Olivia Natt, Alex Stern, Diana Nguyen, Will Reid and Rikki Novetsky

Original music by Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker and Rowan Niemisto

As cars become ever more sophisticated pieces of technology, they’ve begun sharing information about their drivers, sometimes with unnerving consequences.

Kashmir Hill, a features writer for The Times, explains what information cars can log and what that can mean for their owners.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

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Safe Browsing is a Google API that’s free to use for non-commercial purposes, and allows client applications to look up websites in a database to see whether they pose a known risk.

The Enhanced version has offered more extensive protection using real-time URL lookups and machine learning, though it sends information to Google – which the tech titan claims “is only used for security purposes.”

What’s more, the Googlers observe, the size of the local list and the need to maintain connectivity for updates can present a challenge for devices that are resource constrained or have intermittent network access.

So in Chrome for desktop and iOS, and Android later this month, the Standard tier of Safe Browsing is getting privacy-preserving, real-time protection.

This requires some technical enhancement like the implementation of an asynchronous mechanism to prevent network calls from blocking page loads and degrading the user experience.

The system works by first looking in a local cache file to see if the website URL to be visited is known to be safe.

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Airbnb is prohibiting the use of indoor security cameras in its listings globally, the vacation homestay rental company announced on Monday.

While the majority of its listings — more than 7 million worldwide at the end of last year — don’t report having indoor security cameras, Airbnb said the policy change was made in an effort to prioritize the privacy of guests.

Previously, the company allowed indoor security cameras in common areas, as long as they were disclosed on the listing page before booking and clearly visible to guests.

“The update to this policy simplifies our approach and makes clear that security cameras are not allowed inside listings, regardless of their location, purpose or prior disclosure,” read the statement.

The revised policy — which takes effect on April 30 — also includes more thorough rules on the use of outdoor security cameras and other devices such as noise decibel monitors, which are required to be disclosed before guests book.

In a 2022 interview with NPR, Thorin Klosowski — who at the time was privacy and security editor at Wirecutter — also recommends unplugging “anything that looks kind of fishy, whether that’s an alarm clock or just a USB plug that seems random in the wall.”

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Based on a phone number, the federal prosecutors were asking for the user’s name, address, correspondence, contacts, groups, and call records to assist with an FBI investigation.

Whenever Signal receives a properly served subpoena, they work closely with the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge and respond to it, handing over as little user data as possible.

Whittaker stressed that this is “a pretty narrow pipeline that is guarded viciously by ACLU lawyers,” just to obtain a phone number based on a username.

Signal’s leadership is aware that its critics’ most persistent complaint is the phone number requirement, and they’ll readily admit that optional usernames are only a partial fix.

She gave an example of a person who faces severe threats and normally maintains vigilance but whose mother is only on WhatsApp because she can’t figure out the numberless Signal.

Signal engineers have discussed possible alternatives to phone numbers that would maintain that friction, including paid options, but nothing is currently on their road map.

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Spain has moved to block Sam Altman’s cryptocurrency project Worldcoin, the latest blow to a venture that has raised controversy in multiple countries by collecting customers’ personal data using an eyeball-scanning “orb.”

Mar España Martí, AEPD director, said Spain was the first European country to move against Worldcoin and that it was impelled by special concern that the company was collecting information about minors.

The Spanish regulator’s decision is the latest blow to the aspirations of the OpenAI boss and his Worldcoin co-founders Max Novendstern and Alex Blania following a series of setbacks elsewhere in the world.

At the point of its rollout last summer, the San Francisco and Berlin headquartered start-up avoided launching its crypto tokens in the US on account of the country’s harsh crackdown on the digital assets sector.

While some jurisdictions have raised concerns about the viability of a Worldcoin cryptocurrency token, Spain’s latest crackdown targets the start-up’s primary efforts to establish a method to prove customers’ “personhood”—work that Altman characterizes as essential in a world where sophisticated AI is harder to distinguish from humans.

The project attracted media attention and prompted a handful of consumer complaints in Spain as queues began to grow at the stands in shopping centers where Worldcoin is offering cryptocurrency in exchange for eyeball scans.

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The EU has designated six companies as gatekeepers, which it defines as large digital platforms providing “core” services like app stores, search engines, and web browsers.

Alphabet has a sprawling empire, stretching from a dominant search engine to a major web browser and popular mobile operating system, with many services interlinked to augment their power.

Apple has fiercely contested its services falling under the DMA, arguing that it actually runs five separate App Stores (which would be conveniently small enough to avoid the EU regulation) instead of a single platform.

While that gambit wasn’t successful, it did convince the EU commission that iMessage doesn’t qualify as gatekeeper service, avoiding requirements to make it interoperable with other messaging platforms.

The choice to lean on a paid option resulted in a lawsuit from the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), which claimed the “very high subscription fee” meant users “do not have a real choice.” In January, Meta announced the gradual rollout of some other data protection features, including the ability to sever linked Facebook and Instagram accounts and manage them separately.

Microsoft’s Windows operating system falls under the DMA’s regulations, and that’s changing how much the company promotes — or lets users avoid — numerous other apps and services inside it.

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AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker.

“We’re seeing a number of, I would say, parochial and very politically motivated pieces of legislation often indexed on the idea of protecting children And these have been used to push for something that’s actually a very old wish of security services, governments autocrats, which is to systematically backdoor strong encryption,” said Whittaker.

” ‘Accountability’ looks like more monitors, more oversights, more backdoors, more elimination of places where people can express or communicate freely, instead of actually checking on the business models that have created, you know, massive platforms whose surveillance advertising modalities can be easily weaponized for information ops, or doxing, or whatever it is, right?

One specific such proposal is comes via the Investigatory Powers Act in the United Kingdom, under which the government there threatens to prevent any app updates — globally — that it deems a threat to its national security.

“And honestly,” she added, “I think we need the VC community, and the larger tech companies more involved in naming what a threat this is to the industry, and pushing back.”

But of course Signal can’t interoperate with another messaging platform, without them raising their privacy bar significantly,” even ones like WhatsApp that support end-to-end encryption and already partly utilize the protocol.

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Starting with the next software update, though, the company will begin collecting and aggregating “anonymized data about… device usage” from Quest users.

That anonymized data will be used “for things like building better experiences and improving Meta Quest products for everyone,” the company writes.

A linked help page on data sharing clarifies that Meta can collect anonymized versions of any of the usage data included in the “Supplemental Meta Platforms Technologies Privacy Policy,” which was last updated in October.

That document lists a host of personal information that Meta can collect from your headset, including:

The anonymized collection data is used in part to “analyz[e] device performance and reliability” to “improve the hardware and software that powers your experiences with Meta VR Products.”

Those who use a legacy Oculus account are subject to a separate privacy policy that describes a similar but more limited set of data-collection practices.

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Anyone living in the modern world has grown familiar with diminishing privacy amid a surge security cameras, trackers built into smartphones, facial recognition systems, drones and other forms of digital monitoring.

“This is a giant camera in the sky for any government to use at any time without our knowledge,” said Jennifer Lynch, general counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who in 2019 urged civil satellite regulators to address this issue.

“It’s taking us one step closer to a Big-Brother-is-watching kind of world,” added Jonathan C. McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist who publishes a monthly report on civilian and military space developments.

As predicted, pictures from orbit have continually improved in quality, aiding news reporting on wars, refugees, secret bases, human rights abuses, environmental destruction, natural disasters and military buildups.

Albedo’s website says its imagery can help governments “monitor hotspots, eliminate uncertainty, and mobilize with speed.” The company, in listing its core values, says it supports “data-driven investigative journalism” among other activities that “ensure we improve the world we live in.”

Illustrating the fleet’s observational powers, Mr. Tri, the Albedo co-founder, said the space cameras could detect such vehicle details as sunroofs, racing stripes and items in a flatbed truck.

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Last week, co-founder David Crosby said that “so far” the company had identified 14 people who were able to briefly see into a stranger’s property because they were shown an image from someone else’s Wyze camera.

The revelation came from an email sent to customers entitled “An Important Security Message from Wyze,” in which the company copped to the breach and apologized, while also attempting to lay some of the blame on its web hosting provider AWS.

It also claims that all impacted users have been notified of the security breach, and that over 99 percent of all of its customers weren’t affected.

One Reddit user, who described herself as a “23 year old girl” was getting ready for work during the breach, described herself as “disgusted and upset” and said she would be deleting her account.

Wyze is scrambling to fix things by adding an additional layer of verification before users can view images or footage from the Events tab.

“We have also modified our system to bypass caching for checks on user-device relationships until we identify new client libraries that are thoroughly stress tested for extreme events like we experienced on Friday,” the company’s email reads.

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Reddit will let “an unnamed large AI company” have access to its user-generated content platform in a new licensing deal, according to Bloomberg yesterday.

The deal, “worth about $60 million on an annualized basis,” the outlet writes, could still change as the company’s plans to go public are still in the works.

The news also follows an October story that Reddit had threatened to cut off Google and Bing’s search crawlers if it couldn’t make a training data deal with AI companies.

Last year, it successfully stonewalled its way out of the biggest protest in its history after changes to its third-party API access pricing caused developers of the most popular Reddit apps to shut down.

As Bloomberg writes, Reddit’s year-over-year revenue was up by 20 percent by the end of 2023, but it was still $200 million shy of a $1 billion target it had set two years prior.

The company was reportedly advised to seek a $5 billion valuation when it opens up for public investment, which is expected to happen in March.

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Dr Katharine Kemp, from the Faculty of Law & Justice at the University of New South Wales, says cars can collect information through features like their cameras, sensors and internet-connected systems, but also from drivers’ mobile devices and their dealings with related third parties.

The program’s policy document says Toyota collects data for various purposes if drivers don’t opt out — including for safety, security, research, product development and data analysis — but the company may also share it with third parties such as finance and insurance companies, debt collection agencies and market research organisations.

“The more I looked into it, the way that Toyota can log into your car remotely, keep a record of all sorts of bits and pieces, and possibly share your driving behaviour with your insurance company — I just thought the whole lot outweighed the benefits,” he said.

In a statement to ABC News, the company said customers could opt out of Connected Services, but that doing so would disable other features including Bluetooth and speaker functionality.

The report found brands such as BMW, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, Kia, and Subaru could “collect deeply personal data such as sexual activity, immigration status, race, facial expressions, weight, health and genetic information, and where you drive”, which they could potentially sell to third parties.

CHOICE’s Mr Alam told the ABC’s RN Drive that consumers should be able to have modern connectivity features without car companies sharing their information with third parties.

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It’s estimated that more than one in five adults in Canada —  or 6.5 million people — don’t have a family physician or nurse practitioner they can see regularly, and virtual care is helping to fill the void.

Spithoff co-authored the study in this week’s BMJ Open, based on interviews with 18 individuals employed or affiliated with the Canadian virtual care industry between October 2021 and January 2022.

“All of this is happening because of a business model that sees value in collecting that data and using it in a variety of ways that have little to do with patient care and more to do in building up the assets of that company,” Herder said.

Other industry insiders were concerned about how data, such as browsing information, might be shared with third parties such as Google and Meta, the owner of Facebook, for marketing purposes, Spithoff said.

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada, which funded the study, said in an email that health professionals conduct commercial activities, and therefore the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act applies.

Tara Sampalli, senior scientific director at Nova Scotia Health Innovation Hub, said the province’s contract with Maple means residents’ data can’t be used in other ways, such as by third-party providers.

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Protesters who wear masks could face arrest, up to a month in jail and a £1,000 fine under proposed measures that human rights campaigners claim are pandering to “culture war nonsense”.

Police in England and Wales will be given the power to arrest people if they are wearing face coverings at specific demonstrations, the Home Office has said.

The move is in direct response to the four protesters being cleared of criminal damage after toppling a statute of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in 2022 .

Ministers will also make climbing on war memorials a specific public order offence, carrying a three-month sentence and a £1,000 fine.

Shami Chakrabarti, the human rights lawyer and peer, said: “Should rape victims or refugees peacefully protesting really be punished for covering their faces to protect their identities?

The home secretary, James Cleverly, said that recent protests had seen “a small minority dedicated to causing damage and intimidating the law-abiding majority”.

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Mark Zuckerberg bragged about his vast library of content, which includes all your posts, reels, and comments, during Meta’s earnings call Thursday.

“We estimate [this] is greater than the Common Crawl dataset, and people share large numbers of public text posts in comments across our services as well.”

Zuckerberg’s braggadocious claim about Meta’s very large dataset comes shortly after The New York Times sued OpenAI over intellectual property.

But Meta is pulling an old trick out of its playbook: extracting as much value out of Instagram and Facebook users as humanly possible, and totally owning your online self.

Without any grand announcement or notice to users, Meta has essentially claimed ownership of your public social media profile and will use it to generate billions of dollars.

Book publishers and news organizations understand how valuable this data is to AI, but social media users, once again, are being thrown to the curb.

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Bob Dyachenko, owner of SecurityDiscovery.com and researchers from Cybernews discovered the data breach on an unsecured web instance.

The researchers said: ‘The dataset is extremely dangerous as threat actors could leverage the aggregated data for a wide range of attacks.’

They say that these attacks could include identity theft, sophisticated phishing schemes, targeted cyberattacks, and unauthorized access to personal and sensitive accounts.

Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor for ESET told MailOnline: 'This is an absolutely huge breach of data.

Simply enter your email address or phone number into the search bar and click ‘check now’ to see whether that account information has been leaked.

‘Apart from that, users whose data has been included in supermassive MOAB may become victims of spear-phishing attacks or receive high levels of spam emails.’

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Apple’s new rules in the European Union mean browsers like Firefox can finally use their own engines on iOS.

Although this may seem like a welcome change, Mozilla spokesperson Damiano DeMonte tells The Verge it’s “extremely disappointed” with the way things turned out.

“We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple’s proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps,” DeMonte says.

In iOS 17.4, Apple will no longer force browsers in the EU to use WebKit, the underlying engine that powers Safari.

“Apple’s proposals fail to give consumers viable choices by making it as painful as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari,” DeMonte adds.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney called the new terms a “horror show,” while Spotify said the changes are a “farce.” Apple’s guidelines are still pending approval by the EU Commission.

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The data is unnecessary for processing notifications, the researchers said, and seems related to analytics, advertising, and tracking users across different apps and devices.

It’s par for the course that apps would find opportunities to sneak in more data collection, but “we were surprised to learn that this practice is widely used,” said Tommy Mysk, who conducted the tests along with Talal Haj Bakry.

For one, Apple gives app developers details about what’s going on with notifications directly, so there’s no need to collect additional information if you know what happened after you pinged your users.

Furthermore, a lot of the data that apps are collecting seems unrelated to analyzing how well notifications are working, like your phone’s available disk space or the time since your last reboot, Mysk said.

Mysk said if a company like Google can send you a notification without snooping on other details, that suggests there are ulterior motives for the data collection he spotted.

Unfortunately, you might have heard that big companies sometimes tell lies, which would get in the way of that solution, and Apple doesn’t have a stellar track record of enforcing similar rules.

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Today, Apple announced how it plans to change the rules for developers releasing iOS software in the European Union in response to the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) coming into force in March.

Developers can either choose to use these new business terms or stick with the existing model and continue to distribute through the App Store as normal.

The App Store itself is also opening up to allow game streaming services globally, which, until now, have been all but banned under Apple’s existing policies.

Earlier this week, Spotify — a longtime critic of Apple’s 30 percent commission rate — announced plans to bring in-app purchases back to its iOS app to let users upgrade subscriptions or buy audiobooks in the EU after the DMA comes into force.

Passed in 2022, the DMA is the EU’s strongest attempt yet to rein in the alleged anticompetitive practices of Big Tech companies, which the regulation refers to as “gatekeepers.” The EU designated Apple as a gatekeeper last September and listed its App Store, Safari browser, and iOS operating system as “core platform services” that would have to comply with the DMA’s rules.

As well as designating iOS, Safari, and the App Store as core platform services, the European Commission also opened an investigation into whether iMessage should be included (which would include having to make it interoperable with rivals), but reports suggest it might avoid being designated, and today’s announcement from Apple makes no mention of changes coming to iMessage.

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With iOS 17.4, Apple is making a number of huge changes to the way its mobile operating system works in order to comply with new regulations in the EU.

One of them is an important product shift: for the first time, Apple is going to allow alternative browser engines to run on iOS — but only for users in the EU.

Apple is clearly only doing this because it is required to by the EU’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA), which stipulates, among other things, that users should be allowed to uninstall preinstalled apps — including web browsers — that “steer them to the products and services of the gatekeeper.” In this case, iOS is the gatekeeper, and WebKit and Safari are Apple’s products and services.

Even in its release announcing the new features, Apple makes clear that it’s mad about them: “This change is a result of the DMA’s requirements, and means that EU users will be confronted with a list of default browsers before they have the opportunity to understand the options available to them,” the company says.

Apple argues (without any particular merit or evidence) that these other engines are a security and performance risk and that only WebKit is truly optimized and safe for iPhone users.

But in the EU, we’re likely to see these revamped browsers in the App Store as soon as iOS 17.4 drops in March: Google, for one, has been working on a non-WebKit version of Chrome for at least a year.

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If found guilty, the university student faces a hefty bill for expenses after two Spanish Air Force jets were scrambled.

Mr Verma’s message was picked up by the UK security services who flagged it to Spanish authorities while the easyJet plane was still in the air.

A court in Madrid heard it was assumed the message triggered alarm bells after being picked up via Gatwick’s Wi-Fi network.

Appearing in court on Monday, Mr Verma - who is now studying economics at Bath University - said the message was “a joke in a private group setting”.

He said that the plane’s pilot made an announcement, telling passengers that the fighter jets had been scrambled because of a distress signal that had been sent by mistake.

Mr Verma is not facing terrorism charges or a possible jail term, but could be fined up to €22,500 (£19,300) if found guilty and the Spanish defence ministry is demanding €95,000 in expenses.

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The National Science Foundation (NSF) and 10 other agencies are partnering with artificial intelligence developers to fulfill part of President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, launching a pilot program the administration says will democratize access to research.

The government is working with 15 private sector partners, including Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, AMD, EleutherAI, Google, Hugging Face, IBM, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Palantir.

“To continue leading in AI research and development, we must create opportunities across the country to advance AI innovation and strengthen educational opportunities, empowering the nation to shape international standards and igniting economic growth,” NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan said in the statement.

While the US continues to lead investment and research into generative AI thanks to companies like Google and OpenAI based in the country, other regions are boosting their focus on the technology.

According to the Harvard Business Review, China, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany round out the top five countries putting resources into AI development.

However, such close collaboration between the government and the major tech players raised the specter of regulatory capture that will not disappear with the launch of NAIRR.

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Tal Be’ery, the co-founder and CTO of crypto wallet maker ZenGo, found that it’s possible to determine whether a user on WhatsApp is using more than just the mobile app.

Be’ery demonstrated and proved his findings in tests performed with WhatsApp numbers controlled by TechCrunch.

“[It] could be useful for information gathering and plotting an attack,” Runa Sandvik, a digital security expert, told TechCrunch, referring to how hackers could figure out that their target is using WhatsApp on a desktop, which is generally an easier target to compromise than a mobile phone.

“It at least tells you more about the devices they use and how ‘accessible’ their WhatsApp setup may be,” said Sandivk, who is the founder of Granitt, a startup that aims to train at-risk people like journalists, activists, and politicians.

Meta’s spokesperson Zade Alsawah told TechCrunch that the company received Be’ery’s research and concluded that the app’s current design “is what users want and expect.”

Anyone can find out this kind of information by using WhatsApp on the web and inspecting traffic with a browser’s developer tool, Be’ery explained.

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The change is being made as Google prepares to settle a class-action lawsuit that accuses the firm of privacy violations related to Chrome’s Incognito mode.

This won’t change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google."

The stable and Canary warnings both say that your browsing activity might still be visible to “websites you visit,” “your employer or school,” or “your Internet service provider.”

We asked Google when the warning will be added to Chrome’s stable channel and whether the change is mandated by or related to the pending settlement of the privacy class-action suit.

Incognito mode in Chrome will continue to give people the choice to browse the Internet without their activity being saved to their browser or device."

On December 26, 2023, Google and the plaintiffs announced that they reached a settlement that they planned to present to the court for approval within 60 days.

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Microsoft hasn’t announced pricing for these credits yet, but one can assume the company will eventually start charging once you run out of them.

Bing uses a similar system, but once you run out of “daily boosts,” the image creation through DALL-E simply slows down.

Other Windows testers have even found references to a waitlist for the feature and a hero image that Microsoft may use to market its new Notepad Cowriter.

The style of the image is identical to how Microsoft markets its Copilot features inside Office apps like Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint.

Now, I’m old enough to remember a time when Notepad was but a mere simple Windows app that had barely been touched for more than three decades.

I’d rather see Microsoft continue on its path of improving Notepad in meaningful ways, especially since it’s removing WordPad from Windows after nearly 30 years.

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A senator has complained that American law enforcement agencies snoop on US citizens and residents, seemingly without regard for the privacy provisions of the Fourth Amendment, under a secret program called the Hemisphere Project that allows police to conduct searches of trillions of phone records.

“I have serious concerns about the legality of this surveillance program, and the materials provided by the DoJ contain troubling information that would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress,” Wyden wrote in a letter [PDF] to US Attorney General Merrick Garland.

AT&T declined to answer any specific questions about Hemisphere, but a spokesperson told The Register: “To be clear, any information referred to in Senator Wyden’s letter would be compelled by subpoena, warrant, or court order.”

Hemisphere first came to light in a 2013 New York Times report that alleged the “scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the NSA’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act.”

The White House doesn’t directly pay AT&T - instead the ONDCP provides a grant to the Houston High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, which is a partnership between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.

He also cites ONDCP slides and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) emails disclosing that AT&T searches records kept by its wholesale division, which carries communications on behalf of other telecom companies and their customers.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and hundreds of experts don’t, pointing out that elements of proposed revisions to EU regulations called eIDAS would exempt state-approved certificates from security action by browsers.

This would give states, state-approved organisations, or anyone corruptly part of that particular chain of trust, the ability to make fake sites that monitor and decrypt Web traffic silently and at scale.

The EFF is a fully open group of people with a long record of identifying and warning about harmful attempts to damage user freedoms on the internet.

The eIDAS regulation makes an enormous change by mandating man-in-the-middle attack technology that it would be illegal for browser makers to defend against.

It weakens the security on which the web is built in a unique way for unsophisticated users, while giving a wide range of entities the tools to decrypt data of all kinds.

It is as likely to go wrong as any state-run secret security system, through incompetence, accident or malevolence, with consequences that could affect not just the half-billion EU citizens but all those who use EU-based services.

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The Guardian first reported that Hikvision enabled police clients to set up alarms for when cameras detect any type of protest activity such as “gathering crowds to disrupt order in public places”, “unlawful assembly, procession, demonstration” and threats to “petition”.

Amnesty investigators said the cameras are at high risk of being connected to Mabat 2000, an Israeli police-run facial-recognition surveillance network that spans the entire city of East Jerusalem.

Ultimately, Palestinians “don’t need to see” that the cameras are employing facial recognition to “know that they are being watched at every turn”, said Matthew Mahmoudi, an Amnesty International researcher on AI and human rights.

In 2021, the Washington Post revealed the existence of a vast database called Wolf Pack, which contained images of and all the information available on all 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank.

“Even their family life and the sort of very mundane everyday actions suddenly become acts of resistance in the face of this ubiquitous surveillance apparatus that underpins much of how apartheid is exacted on Palestinians,” Mahmoudi added.

According to the report, Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps analyzed and verified the authenticity of 15 videos that showed Palestinians being detained “where surveillance technologies appeared to have been used for registration, identification or recording”.

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According to the documents, obtained by the advocacy group Just Futures Law and shared with The Intercept, LexisNexis Risk Solutions began selling surveillance tools to the border enforcement agency in December 2022.

The $15.9 million contract includes a broad menu of powerful tools for locating individuals throughout the United States using a vast array of personal data, much of it obtained and used without judicial oversight.

Through LexisNexis, CBP investigators gained a convenient place to centralize, analyze, and search various databases containing enormous volumes of intimate personal information, both public and proprietary.

Among other tools, the contract shows LexisNexis is providing CBP with social media surveillance, access to jail booking data, face recognition and “geolocation analysis & geographic mapping” of cellphones.

All this data can be queried in “large volume online batching,” allowing CBP investigators to target broad groups of people and discern “connections among individuals, incidents, activities, and locations,” handily visualized through Google Maps.

While LexisNexis is known to provide similar data services to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another division of the Department of Homeland Security, details of its surveillance work with CBP were not previously known.

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