data privacy

NEW DELHI: After unveiling it in December last year, and subsequently rolling it out in the US in March, Instagram’s parental controls for parents of underage social media users are finally…

Virtual private networks, better known asVPNs, are shrouded in mystery. These software tools are meant to hide the data coming in and out of your phone or PC, to make web browsing and other activity more private. But it isn’t always that simple.…

Twitter was questioned rigorously by Congress leader Shashi Tharoor-led Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information and Technology on Friday over a whistleblower's revelations on its India operations. The social media platform's officials were asked about data security and privacy. The Twitter executives denied the whistleblower's claims. However, as per the sources, the panel has cited the replies provided by Twitter executives as "not satisfactory". The parliamentary committee is currently working to prepare a…

The Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has withdrawn a tender, published earlier to hire a consultant to monetise the passenger data. The update was provided by a senior IRCTC official to the Congress leader Shashi Tharoor-led parliamentary panel on Friday. The railway company announced the tender in the second half of this month. The tender garnered controversy over privacy concerns regarding monetisation of passenger and freight customer data. IRCTC has now informed that it is no longer pursuing…

The microblogging site Twitter and Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) have been summoned to appear before the Congress MP Shashi Tharoor-led…

However, after several decades, it appears as if captcha’s dominance over the internet could be waning. Apple has decided to give the technology the boot, and its impact on things like email analytics and ad tracking have already had an impact. At its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, the company announced it would be replacing captchas with Private Access Tokens. “Sometimes a captcha is just a button to press,” says Apple engineer Tommy Pauly. “But others can be a challenge to fill out.”Apple’s alternative,…

Google has announced that it is expanding the testing of Privacy Sandbox APIs to more population, essentially postponing the phasing out of third-party cookies in Chrome to 2024. This is a part of deploying Privacy Sandbox — its solution to provide more private, targeted advertising on the Internet. Google says that it got feedback from developers, publishers, marketers, and regulators asking for more time to evaluate as well as to test the new technologies before disabling third-party cookies in Chrome. Google in 2020…

Now that Congress has failed to pass a bill that would guarantee a right to travel across state lines to obtain an abortion, many are worried that conservative states that have started restricting abortion rights could soon decide to block people seeking abortions from leaving their own state for that purpose. Many Republican lawmakers are already discussing this possibility. But would such drastic restrictions even be possible—or, at the very least, legal?The Biden administration, aware that Congress will likely not act…

The EU's top court on Tuesday put limits on how European spy and security agencies could harvest troves of personal data, but said this could be done under a serious threat to national security.At the request of the courts in Belgium, Britain, France, and the European Court of Justice confirmed that "EU law precludes national legislation" that requires telcos and tech companies to carry out the "indiscriminate retention" of data, a statement saidHowever, it does allow for exemptions in cases of "serious threat to national…

Hi, folks. The winner of the week is Reed Hastings, who lost a million subscribers but saw Netflix’s stock skyrocket because he didn’t lose more. What a showman!The Plain ViewI got an email from Google the other day. “Dear Steven,” went the text, “This is a reminder that any existing Location History data you have in your Google Account will be deleted on September 1, 2022.” That was a surprise to me, because I thought I had long ago turned off the voluntary feature that let Google log my whereabouts, as if I had my own…