Internet privacy

Photo: Drew Angerer (Getty Images)A patchwork of individual state privacy laws isn’t filling the hole left by absent federal government regulation on facial recognition. Virginia, which approved a ban on local police use of biometric identification tools around a year ago, formally bailed on the law’s most substantive measures on Friday. Now, under an amended bill, law enforcement can implement the technology in a number of scenarios, including when an officer loosely harbors a “reasonable suspicion” an individual has…

View of the biometric facial recognition system in front of a security checkpoint in the departure area of Hamburg Airport. Photo: Marcus Brandt (AP)A group of House lawmakers charged with investigating the implications of biometric surveillance empaneled three experts Wednesday to testify about the future of facial recognition and other tools widely employed by the U.S. government with little regard for citizens’ privacy.The experts described a country—and a world—that is being saturated with biometric sensors. Hampered…

Photo: PixieMe (Shutterstock)Mozilla’s latest version of Firefox might just be the answer for users who hate being tracked when clicking on links off sites like Facebook.Bleeping Computer first spotted the new privacy feature after the new 102 version of Firefox was released Tuesday. With the new update, certain tracking parameters from Facebook, Olytics, HubSpot, and Marketo can be disabled, according to thereport. These parameters are essentially a piece of code added onto the end of a URL address that will tell the…

Photo: GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP (Getty Images)A data breach at the California Department of Justice has spilled a wealth of data about the state’s gun owners onto the internet.The breach, which involved “2022 Firearms Dashboard Portal”—a website launched Monday—revealed names, birthdays, addresses, ages, the purchase date and type of firearm permit they possessed, and their Criminal Identification Index numbers, which are used to track state and federal criminal records. Included in this trove were the identities…

Photo: Olivier Douliery (Getty Images)I don’t know about the rest of you, but when the news cycle gets bad—like real bad—one of my favorite things to do is distract myself with some spooky content. Neuroscientists and psychologists alike have all tried to grapple with the question of why some people love to spend their spare time watching, say, a grisly slasher movie or browsing sinister sites. The science is still up for debate—some people think this kind of content taps into a primal survival instinct, while others…

Rep. Kelly Armstrong, a member of the House Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, accompanies House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy outside for a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 27, 2021.Photo: Associated Press (AP)House Republicans want to drastically change a federal privacy bill that Democrats in the Senate are also threatening to murder. The American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA) is one of the few pieces of privacy legislation to get the time of day on CapitolHill in the last few…

Photo: Grand Warszawski (Shutterstock)In yet another example of T-Mobile being The Worst with its customer’s data, the company announced a new money-making scheme this week: selling its customers’ app download data and web browsing history to advertisers. The package of data is part of the company’s new “App Insights” adtech product that was in beta for the last year but formally rolled out this week. According to AdExchanger, which first reported news of the announcement from the Cannes Festival, the new product will let…

Instagram revealed Thursday it was testing two new age verification methods that aim to ensure adolescents experience an age appropriate version of the app.The photo-sharing app announced that current teen usersin the U.S. who want to edit their birth date to indicate that they’re over 18 years old on the app will have prove that this indeed the case. Besides providing Instagram with an ID, young people will have the novel option to upload a video selfie and have it vetted by an AI specialized in facial age estimation…

Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)Another day, another antitrust investigation into a tech giant. This time, it’s Apple: Germany’s competition watchdog on Tuesday announced a new probe into Apple’s slate of anti-tracking tech that the company rolled out last year. The Bundeskartellamt’s investigation is primarily focused on Apple’s App Tracking Transparency Framework (or ATT, for short). For those unfamiliar, ATT is the set of rules that Apple rolled out as part of iOS 14 that require third-party app developers to ask…

Google was allegedly collecting biometric data from photos without notifying users.Photo: Leon Neal (Getty Images)Google took another hit today. The tech company has settled for $100 million following a class action lawsuit in Illinois over data privacy concerns from users of the Google Photos app.Why did Google get sued?A class action lawsuit was filed by the plaintiffs against Google, alleging that the company broke Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The act states that any private company collecting…