Privacy

Here’s the Annoying New Way Facebook Makes Money Off Your Life

Facebook really needs to start making more money, or its stock will soon be worth about as much as a shopping bag full of mulch. How do they do that? Ads! New ads. But these new ads involve your life. Facebook spilled the beans on its new stab at ad cash in a public blog…

Iran Walks Back Internet Censorship, Restores Gmail

After seriously flipping out, cutting of Iranian access to Google and basically herding all its citizens into a tiny little government-approved intra-net pen, the Iranian government has softened its Internet ban just a little bit and restored access to Gmail. https://gizmodo.com/iran-shuts-down-google-will-completely-cut-citizens-of-5945862 Though the outcry against censoring the Internet at large was loud, the backlash against…

California Protects Social Media Accounts From the Grasp of Employers

A small victory in the fight for digital privacy: California Governor Jerry Brown has announced his signing of bills to prevent employers and universities from demanding social network login. https://gizmodo.com/facebook-tells-users-not-to-give-passwords-to-employers-5895846 In fact he’s signing two bills: Assembly Bill 1844 and Senate Bill 1349. The first prevents employers from asking workers for social media usernames or…

How Vicious Spyware Contaminated Hundreds of Thousands of Rental PCs

Hundreds of thousands of PCs are rented every year in the United States. And, it turns out, a huge chunk of them have absurdly invasive, incredibly dangerous spyware preinstalled—by the company that rents them. Here are the main players: DesignerWare is a software company that provides a program called PC Rental Agent to rent-to-own computer…

The 20 Most Common PINs Are Painfully Obvious

We already know people are really bad at picking passwords, but they’re also god awful at choosing obvious, crackable credit card PINs. In fact, the most common four-digit code is not-so shockingly, 1-2-3-4. Come on, people. Privacy guru Nick Berry crunched the numbers from previously exposed pass codes to find the 20 most popular and…

No, Your Private Messages Are NOT Public on Facebook

You might have read somewhere today that Facebook made your pre-2009 private messages public on your own Timeline. And on your friends’ Timelines! This would be a huge scandal, except it’s not true at all. Facebook, in a statement to the BBC, immediately denied the entire leak after it started to make the rounds: “A…

Iran Shuts Down Google, Will Completely Cut Citizens Off the Internet

While Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in New York, his cronies at home are shutting every single one of their citizens out of the internet. Their reasoning: ‘we may get attacked by zionist viruses.’ Riiiight. On Sunday, the Iranian state television network announced that Google and Gmail would be blocked “within a few hours.” The…

Facebook is turning off its facial recognition and auto-tagging in the EU following privacy investigations. [Telegraph]

Facebook Is Now Recording Everyone You Stalk

Do you like looking at the profiles of people you don’t know that well on Facebook? Of course you do, because we’re all sick and it’s fun. One wrinkle: there’s now a list of everything you search for on FB. Starting today, Facebook says: In addition to your other activity, you’ll be able to see…

Stop Using Fake Names on Facebook

For many good reasons, anonymity is important on the Internet. It’s handy for unfettered discussion, whistle-blowing, and dissent under oppression! For the general preservation of privacy, it’s nice to go nameless. But Facebook isn’t the internet. And using pseudonyms on Facebook is stupid, irritating, and misguided. And it’s making the site worse for the rest…

Does Ad Tracking Really Bother You?

The thought of being watched is always sort of unsettling. The thought of being watched by enemies or the government can be downright scary, but the thought of being watched by advertisers is anywhere from gross to “meh.” Do Not Track, and privacy-oriented browser extensions show that the lack of privacy is concerning to a…

Twitter Has Lost the Fight to Keep Your Private Tweets Private

Welp, looks like your tweets really aren’t protected by law. After months of haggling with the courts, Twitter has finally turned over the protected tweets of Occupy Wall Street protestor Malcolm Harris after his arrest in October. Had Twitter persisted in its resistance to the court order demanding the tweets, it would have been held…

Facebook Could Help Hide Your Identity

When you think of privacy protection, chances are Facebook does not immediately spring to mind. But anonymity researchers are suggesting that social networks may hold the key to better anonymous online interactions. Existing anonymity tools, such as Tor, work by routing a user’s internet traffic through a random chain of other computers called a circuit.…

FBI’s Sinister New $1 Billion Project Will Track Everyone By Their Face

How would you feel if the government could easily track your movements by automatically identifying your face on images captured by the ever-growing network of CCTV of cameras in America? The FBI is will be able to do just that soon, with its one-billion-dollar Next Generation Identification program. The FBI has been pursuing their new…

Are You Facebook Friends With Your Coworkers?

The Gizmodo family is a tight-knit bunch. We work together, we drink together, and then we like to post the pictures of our antics on Facebook and “like” them all at once. But certainly not all work cultures are like ours, and not all bosses and coworkers as, well…fun. Do your coworkers send you friend…

Rdio Users Can Now Listen to All Their Favorite, Most Embarrassing Music in Protected Privacy

Broadcasting your mortifying taste in music with absolutely every human you know has always been an opt-in/opt-out choice for Spotify users—eve with the music streaming service’s required Facebook account-linking. But Rdio loyalists haven’t been so lucky. Not until now, at least. Today, a post on Rdio’s company blog announced the first of a series of…

Why You Shouldn’t Freak Out If Hackers Leaked Your Apple Device ID

Antisec has reportedly released a million Apple device UDIDs, which it claims to have taken from the 12 million it got from a breach of an FBI laptop. That is kind of terrifying for a variety of reasons, but let’s just focus on the one you care most about: What is a UDID, and how…

AntiSec Leaks 1 Million Apple Device IDs Obtained During FBI Breach (Updated)

Antisec has released 1 million Apple Unique Device Identifiers (UDIDs), claiming that it obtained them after breaching an FBI computer. It also claims to have over 12 million IDs in total, along with user names, device names, cell phone numbers and addresses to go with them. This is very not good. In a statement Antisec…

The Annoying Thing Facebook Is About to Do with Your Phone Numbers and Emails (UPDATED)

Today, temporarily, some users with access to Facebook’s Power Editor tool got a glimpse of a new targeted ad system the social network is prepping to roll out next week. InsideFacebook is reporting that a powerful tool granting premium advertisers access to users’ phone numbers and email addresses, as well as their user ID, has…

Twitter is Targeting Targeted Ads to Become More Targeted (Updated)

Twitter just announced that its letting advertisers create better, more targeted advertisements so you’ll actually see stuff you care about in your Twitter feed. It’s the way the Internet works in 2012—ads already know your tastes. Twitter uses a variety of signals to determine what a Twitter user likes such as who you’re following and…