Collecting

Image via Netflix. Adam Driver can now be mentioned in the same breath as Robert De Niro, Christian Bale, and Jared Leto as an actor who has successfully gained weight for a role; it was for upcoming film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s hugely influential 1985 novel White Noise, and Driver reportedly left a “backup stomach” that was almost used in the movie collecting dust, instead. Driver plays Jack Gladney in the satirical comedy-drama, a professor who specializes in “Hitler studies,” as he navigates the various…

A group of workers at Google parent Alphabet Inc. GOOG 0.94% has asked the company to stop collecting data on users seeking information about abortions, according to a petition sent to Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai this week. The petition, signed by more than 650 workers, also called on the company to remove search results for crisis pregnancy centers, which it said were misleading to those seeking…

Meta may have scooped up sensitive medical information without consent. The Verge reports that two proposed class-action lawsuits accuse the company and hospitals of violating HIPAA, the California Invasion of Privacy Act and other laws by collecting patient data without consent. Meta's Pixel analytic tracking tool allegedly sent health statuses, appointment details and other data to Facebook when it was present on patient portals. In one lawsuit, a patient said Pixel gathered data from the UC San Francisco and Dignity…

By now, most of us are aware social media companies collect vast amounts of our information. By doing this, they can target us with ads and monetise our attention. The latest chapter in the data-privacy debate concerns one of the world's most popular apps among young people – TikTok. Yet anecdotally it seems the potential risks aren't really something young people care about. Some were interviewed by The Project this week regarding the risk of their TikTok data being accessed from China.They said it wouldn't stop them…

While Amazon has built a successful business around its online marketplace, have you ever thought how this company became so successful? A part of the answer is collecting user data. We were quite surprised to find out that many elements from our Amazon profile data are visible to the public.Your Amazon profile consists of your bio, social links, shopping lists etc. and this is why you should make it private. It is always recommended to protect and anonymise as much information as it is possible. In this article, we are…

The year is 2100. Society as we know it has collapsed, taking fiat currency with it. The blockchain imploded long ago, fraught with theft and scams and limited by energy shortages and the creative ineptitude of most NFT designers. There’s no more precious metals. We put them all into our phone microchips and then sent them to landfills where plastic eating microbes consumed them by mistake. The only things remaining with exchangeable value (aside from food, seeds, and drinkable a water) are...Pokémon and Magic: The…

Identifying license plate information redacted by MIT Technology Review.HEATHER MOBLEY / CHARLOTTE FOR CHOICE Although news reports at the time framed this tracking as a new tactic, it goes back decades. One 1993 article from the Buffalo News mentions several accounts from clinic staffers and clients of harassing phone calls from anti-abortion activists that appear to be the result of license plate tracking. That same year, a Florida training session for activists organized by the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue…

More than 40 Democratic members of the US Congress are asking Google to stop what they see as the unnecessary collection and retention of people's location data, arguing the information could be used to identify women seeking abortions.In a letter sent Tuesday to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google parent Alphabet, the lawmakers express concern that if abortion were to become illegal in the US, the company's "current practice of collecting and retaining extensive records of cell phone location data will allow it to become a…

Some of the top 100,000 websites are found to be collecting data from their online forms even before you hit the Submit button, a study conducted by researchers has revealed. In some cases, many of these top-visited websites were even collecting password data of their visitors, without user consent. A large number of the websites collecting personal data including email addresses of their users without their prior permission appear to have this behaviour due to third-party trackers that are integrated for advertising and…