Facebook privacy lapse leaks 400m phone numbers in USA, Britain and Vietnam

Phone numbers linked to more than 400 million Facebook accounts were listed online in the latest privacy lapse for the social media giant, US media reported Wednesday. An exposed server stored 419 million records on users across several databases — including 133 million US accounts, more than 50 million in Vietnam, and 18 million in …

Zao ‘Deepfake’ face swap app retreats after privacy issues backlash

A new Chinese app that lets people swap faces with celebrities is updating its policies after a backlash from users concerned about their privacy and how its convincing fake image technology could be used. The app, called Zao, works by superimposing an image of the user’s face onto a character in a video or GIF …

Sundar Pichai says Google is now thinking privacy first

In a series of sweeping announcements on Tuesday, Google announced it’s unveiling new privacy tools that would, if they lived up to the hype, let users restrict how companies track their online activities and compile and sell their personal data. Speaking at an annual conference for developers on Tuesday, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, delivered …

Oath, the owner of AOL and Yahoo to pay $5 million to settle charges for violating children’s privacy law.

Oath, the owner of AOL and Yahoo, has agreed to pay about $5 million to settle charges from the New York attorney general that the media company’s online advertising business was violating a federal children’s privacy law. AOL, through its ad exchange, helped place targeted display ads on hundreds of websites that it knew were …

New Facebook Portal videochat hardware looks like a privacy disaster waiting to happen

Facebook has released new AI controlled hardware at quite n odd time when its fighting privacy breach allegations. The devices Facebook claims creates a new way to videochat with your Facebook friends. It’s not an app, nor is it some awkward virtual-reality playpen. It’s a device called Portal, and it’s meant to sit in your …

Privacy International was unlawfully spied on by UK intelligence, agency admits

The UK’s domestic-facing intelligence agency, MI5, has admitted that it captured and read Privacy International’s private data as part of its Bulk Communications Data (BCD) and Bulk Personal Datasets (BPD) programmes, which hoover up massive amounts of the public’s data. In further startling legal disclosures, all three of the UK’s primary intelligence agencies – GCHQ, …

FTC confirms Facebook’s privacy practices are under scrutiny

US Federal Trade Commission is investigating Facebook’s privacy practices following a week of scandals and public outrage over the company’s failure to protect the personal information of tens of millions of users. “The FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook,” said Tom Pahl, acting director of …

Privacy Over-reach outcry after Swedish ISP forced hand over Pirate Bay customers data

A landmark court ruling in Sweden could have dire consequences for those using torrent sites like the Pirate Bay to download pirate films and TV shows. One of Sweden’s key internet service providers (ISP’s), Bahnhof, has been ordered to provide the names of customers using its services to download pirated content. Bahnhof is a popular …

Tenta DNS resolver, will help preserve users’ privacy after the fall of net neutrality

Net neutrality is on its death bed. With it gone, ISPs will be able to strip-data-mine your every move on the web. There are answers. One is Tenta‘s new secure Domain Name System (DNS) resolver, Tenta DNS. This receives and sends the directions to the websites you visit using the secure Transport Layer Security (TLS) …

Privacy Breach? Phones pre-loaded with tracking software on sale in the UK

Smartphones with pre-installed advanced tracking software are on sale in Britain to help employers to snoop on their staff. The devices can be bought in bulk and sold on to unwitting customers, who would have no indication that their messages, location, app usage, call histories, photographs and emails were being monitored at all times. UK …