WhatsApp betrayed its longstanding commitment to privacy today, when it announced plans to start sharing data with Facebook. But what data, exactly, will WhatsApp share with Facebook? The company won’t say.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange promised to leak “thousands” of documents from the Clinton campaign on Wednesday during an interview with Fox News’s Megyn Kelly. He also said the documents would be “significant” in the context of the presidential election. Assange vowed to publish the data before the November…
It was going to happen soon enough: WhatsApp will now start sharing user data with the company that owns it, Facebook.
Way back in February 2015, the FBI infiltrated Playpen, a child pornography ring on the dark web. After taking control of the site, the FBI could have shut it down. But it didn’t.
Not all emails are what they seem. Many messages come with embedded code designed to tell the sender when (and even where) you open them up. It’s a trick often used by marketing companies to work out if you’re actually paying any attention to them, but there are ways of spotting this kind of email tracking.
Instagram released its Stories feature earlier this month—which is basically a rip-off of Snapchat Stories—in order to tap into the ephemeral social media market. In both features, Snapchat and Instagram let your pictures and videos expire after 24 hours, but viewers can still take screenshots. Snapchat lets you know…
States are still scrambling to figure out how to regulate fantasy sports websites like DraftKings and FanDuel. And while much of the attention has been focused on whether fantasy sports should be classified as gambling and whether these websites are being upfront about the risks, some consumers are more worried about…
Every day it seems like there’s another hack, password theft, or leak. Both government agencies and private companies are regularly attacked, by intruders just looking for sensitive data to sell, or foreign actors looking for valuable information. That alone is reason enough for a Presidential candidate to at least…
Comcast has logged yet another tally in the competition for Shittiest Company In Existence.
With millions of tourists visiting its theme parks around the world each year, it makes sense that Disney would want to track how visitors move about its attractions to help minimize lines and crowds and also to provide a unique experience for each guest. But does it have to sound so incredibly creepy?
WikiLeaks firmly believes in radical transparency, the idea that the world would be better if there were no secrets. That level of transparency can be used for good, like the time the site published a video called “Collateral Murder” showing innocent journalists shot to oblivion by US troops in 2010. But not always.
France isn’t into Microsoft collecting user data without its consent. The CNIL, France’s National Commission on Informatics and Liberty, issued a formal notice telling the company it has three months to cut it out. If Microsoft fails to comply, the CNIL will issue a sanction against the company.
Last night, Kim Kardashian released video snippets of Kanye West talking to Taylor Swift on the phone about lyrics in his then upcoming song “Famous.” But because West apparently didn’t inform Swift that he was recording the call, he may have broken federal wiretapping law.
The future looks bright, except when it doesn’t. Here are 10 exceptionally regrettable developments we can expect in the coming decades.
Senator Al Franken, best known to the internet as a champion for net neutrality, wants answers from Niantic, the developer of Pokémon Go, about how exactly it’s collecting and storing user data.
There are lots of ways to prevent people from trespassing on your property, including moats, drawbridges, and roaming packs of dogs. But if those tried and true medieval approaches clash with your design aesthetics, you can instead surround your home with a new approach to fencing that secretly retracts and disappears…
Everyone’s stoked about Pokémon Go, but if you’re a privacy conscious player on iOS, you might not like the fact that Pokémon Go (and Ingress, for that matter) has complete access to everything in your Google account. Good news though, you can revoke that access.
Update 7/1/16: Facebook has confirmed there is no way to disable the Slideshow feature.
Amazon is offering pretty sweet new deal by which you can literally sell your eyeballs to the spirit of mobile advertising that lives under the sea—in exchange for a slightly cheaper phone.
Update 6/28/16: Facebook has backtracked and said that it does not use location data. The confusion supposedly arose when Facebook tested a location-based People You May Know feature, but that test had ended.
