Plenty of companies want to build the centerpiece for tomorrow’s smart home. Amazon has a head start, too. Tens of millions of Americans now own Echo devices, and Alexa now has tens of thousands of skills. Adding a voice assistant to any TV, I’ve always thought, could be a game changer. And now, Amazon’s Fire TV Cube…
Where do you go to tell a secret? Probably depends on the secret. What you’d feel comfortable murmuring to a friend in a private meeting is likely not what you’d say loudly to a coworker while your boss is in earshot. Online, we not only communicate, we calculate—based on who we’re speaking to, or what platform we’re…
Dixons Carphone, one of Europe’s largest electronics retailers, disclosed a data breach on Wednesday involving 5.9 million payment cards and 1.2 million personal records.
Apple’s new App Store privacy guidelines restricting apps that collect data on users’ friends—specifically, the address books of iPhone users—already seemed to be in large part a response to Facebook’s sprawling Cambridge Analytica data scandal. But the company could also be targeting Facebook’s Onavo Protect VPN…
Pornhub has taken a strong stance against deepfakes, because the porn site understands that the machine-learning-generated videos that swap out performers’ faces with someone else’s are non-consensual. But a recent lawsuit accuses the company of running a person’s face in an advertisement without their consent.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but it looks like Facebook may have been sharing more of your data than you thought it was. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the social network cut deals with a number of companies to provide access to user records and friend data even after its policy change that…
Apple has been steadily positioning itself as the anti-Facebook for a while now, and between verbal jabs aimed at the social media giant and privacy-focused product decisions, the patient goodwill campaign seems to be working. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t going to save us, and now’s the time to keep your guard up.
Chinese telecom ZTE faced almost certain death after the Department of Commerce slapped it with a seven-year ban on purchasing or using parts from US manufacturers earlier this year amid allegations it violated sanctions on North Korea and Iran. In May, the company ceased business operations—only to soon be brought…
Federal prosecutors have accused Paul Manafort of witness tampering, alleging that he used WhatsApp and Telegram in an attempt to coordinate his testimony with old business associates. Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, may have thought that he was being sneaky by using encrypted chat apps, but Manafort…
Apple is rolling out some new and much-welcomed privacy protections for Safari that it says will prevent third parties from tracking you, particularly when you’re already doing everything you can to fly under the radar.
Apple has apparently relented and let encrypted text and voice service Telegram proceed with an update to make its app compliant with Europe’s new GDPR privacy protections, just days after CEO Pavel Durov alleged Apple was preventing Telegram from releasing updates worldwide at the behest of Russian censors.
Destroying sensitive documents using a paper shredder is a long and boring process because most of the machines are woefully underpowered. Destruction is supposed to be fun, so a gifted Danish hardware hacker upgraded a run-of-the-mill shredder with a 44,400-RPM brushless motor, letting the machine tear through a page…
Papua New Guinea, a nation of over 8 million, has announced that it will shut down Facebook for a month. The PNG government says that the shutdown will give it time to assess the spread of objectionable content on the site like porn and fake news. The government also said that it’s exploring the creation of its own…
Earlier this week, Vermont became the first state in the nation to enact a law that will regulate data brokers that buy and sell personal information in an attempt to add a new layer of accountability to the massive, data-trading companies that often operate without much oversight.
What’s the most terrifying thing you can imagine an Amazon Echo doing? Think realistically. Would it be something simple but sinister, like the artificially intelligent speaker recording a conversation between you and a loved one and then sending that recording to an acquaintance? That seems pretty bad to me. And…
For more than a week, PGP developers have been rapidly working to patch critical flaws in the legacy encryption protocol used for sending and receiving secure emails; a tool that’s widely relied upon by lawyers, journalists, dissidents, and human rights advocates, many of whom operate at the highest levels of risk in…
The European Union’s digital privacy law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), officially went into effect today. But some websites in the U.S. have decided to block their services entirely rather than adhere to the new regulations. Dozens of American newspapers are currently blocked in Europe and…
For a moment, Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before members of the European Parliament looked like it was going to be a very bad day for the Facebook CEO. Then he started answering questions, a flood of pablum spewed from his mouth, and everyone got angry.
A troubling flaw in phone tracking company LocationSmart’s demo tool, used to advertise its services, let anyone take advantage of an easily exploited flaw to track phones from America’s top four carriers without the user’s consent or knowledge, according to KrebsOnSecurity. The demo site was reportedly taken down…
A hacker has reportedly provided journalists with login credentials and other data stolen from the servers of Securus, a company that was recently revealed to be selling cellphone location information to U.S. law enforcement agencies without a warrant.