VPN use rises following Online Safety Act’s age verification controls

As the UK's Online Safety Act came into effect on Friday—along with its age verification controls—the use of virtual private network VPN services has skyrocketed by up to 20-fold across the region. Top10VPN, which monitors VPN traffic around the world, spotted UK VPN traffic spiking 1,327% on Jul...

Age verification: Child protection or privacy risk?

With governments demanding actual age verification on websites with adult content, and platforms like social media and Roblox introducing restrictions based on a user’s age, the controversy about different types of age verification and their implications is growing. Last week, Roblox announced ne...

IDFace: Face Template Protection for Efficient and Secure Identification

As face recognition systems FRS become more widely used, user privacy becomes more important. A key privacy issue in FRS is protecting the user's face template, as the characteristics of the user's face image can be recovered from the template. Although recent advances in cryptographic tools such...

Exploring User Security and Privacy Attitudes and Concerns toward the Use of General-Purpose LLM Chatbots for Mental Health

Individuals are increasingly relying on large language model LLM-enabled conversational agents for emotional support. While prior research has examined privacy and security issues in chatbots specifically designed for mental health purposes, these chatbots are overwhelmingly "rule-based" offering...

"Is It Always Watching? Is It Always Listening?" Exploring Contextual Privacy and Security Concerns toward Domestic Social Robots

Equipped with artificial intelligence AI and advanced sensing capabilities, social robots are gaining interest among consumers in the United States. These robots seem like a natural evolution of traditional smart home devices. However, their extensive data collection capabilities, anthropomorphic...

No thanks: Google lets its Gemini AI access your apps, including messages [updated]

If you're an Android user, you'll need to take action if you don’t want Google's Gemini AI to have access to your apps. That's because, regardless of your previous settings, Google now allows Gemini to interact with third-party apps. Through Gemini extensions, it already had the ability to...

DATABench: Evaluating Dataset Auditing in Deep Learning from an Adversarial Perspective

The widespread application of Deep Learning across diverse domains hinges critically on the quality and composition of training datasets. However, the common lack of disclosure regarding their usage raises significant privacy and copyright concerns. Dataset auditing techniques, which aim to...

Facebook wants to look at your entire camera roll for “AI restyling” suggestions, and more

Facebook's pursuit of your personal data continues apace, and now it has a new target: photos on your phone that you haven't shared with it yet. Techcrunch reports that the social media giant is now asking its users to peek at the photos on their phones' camera rolls. In return it will give them...

HARPT: a Corpus for Analyzing Consumers' Trust and Privacy Concerns in Mobile Health Apps

We present HARPT, a large-scale annotated corpus of mobile health app store reviews aimed at advancing research in user privacy and trust. The dataset comprises over 480,000 user reviews labeled into seven categories that capture critical aspects of trust in applications, trust in providers and...

Risks & Benefits of LLMs & GenAI for Platform Integrity, Healthcare Diagnostics, Cybersecurity, Privacy & AI Safety: a Comprehensive Survey, Roadmap & Implementation Blueprint

Large Language Models LLMs and generative AI GenAI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA, and Copilot, developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are reshaping digital platforms and app ecosystems while introducing key challenges in cybersecurity, privacy, and platform...

Self-Driving Car Video Footage

Two articles crossed my path recently. First, a discussion of all the video Waymo has from outside its cars: in this case related to the LA protests. Second, a discussion of all the video Tesla has from inside its cars. Lots of things are collecting lots of video of lots of other things. How and...

A week in security (June 9 – June 15)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Been scammed online? Here’s what to do How and where to report an online scam Google bug allowed phone number of almost any user to be discovered 44% of people encounter a mobile scam every single day, Malwarebytes finds GirlsDoPorn owner faces life in jail after...

23andMe raked by Congress on privacy, sale of genetic data

In a Senate hearing adequately titled “23 and You: The Privacy and National Security Implications of the 23andMe Bankruptcy,” 23andMe executives addressed concerns about the privacy implications of the company’s sale and the handling of associated genetic data. For those who missed the latest...

Minoritised Ethnic People'S Security and Privacy Concerns and Responses Towards Essential Online Services

Minoritised ethnic people are marginalised in society, and therefore at a higher risk of adverse online harms, including those arising from the loss of security and privacy of personal data. Despite this, there has been very little research focused on minoritised ethnic people's security and...

Popular Chrome Extensions Found Leaking Data via Unencrypted Connections

Popular Chrome extensions exposed user data by sending it over unencrypted HTTP, raising privacy concerns. Symantec urges caution for users...

Synthetic Tabular Data: Methods, Attacks and Defenses

Synthetic data is often positioned as a solution to replace sensitive fixed-size datasets with a source of unlimited matching data, freed from privacy concerns. There has been much progress in synthetic data generation over the last decade, leveraging corresponding advances in machine learning an...

CVE-2021-41157

FreeSWITCH is a Software Defined Telecom Stack enabling the digital transformation from proprietary telecom switches to a software implementation that runs on any commodity hardware. By default, SIP requests of the type SUBSCRIBE are not authenticated in the affected versions of FreeSWITCH. Abuse...

CVE-2014-10374

On Fitbit activity-tracker devices, certain addresses never change. According to the popets-2019-0036.pdf document, this leads to "permanent trackability" and "considerable privacy concerns" without a user-accessible anonymization feature. The devices, such as Charge 2, transmit Bluetooth Low...

Privacy and Confidentiality Requirements Engineering for Process Data

The application and development of process mining techniques face significant challenges due to the lack of publicly available real-life event logs. One reason for companies to abstain from sharing their data are privacy and confidentiality concerns. Privacy concerns refer to personal data as...

Blockchain Technology: Core Mechanisms, Evolution, and Future Implementation Challenges

Blockchain technology has emerged as one of the most transformative digital innovations of the 21st century. This paper presents a comprehensive review of blockchain's fundamental architecture, tracing its development from Bitcoin's initial implementation to current enterprise applications. We...