Lawsuit About WhatsApp Security

Attaullah Baig, WhatsApp's former head of security, has filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that Facebook deliberately failed to fix a bunch of security flaws, in violation of its 2019 settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission. The lawsuit, alleging violations of the whistleblower...

Nexar dashcam video database hacked

A hacker cracked into a database of video recordings taken from Nexar-branded cameras, which are built to be placed drivers’ cars, according to a new report from 404 Media. Nexar is a dashcam company that promotes its products as “virtual CCTV cameras” and offers automatic cloud uploads of critic...

Connected and Exposed: Cybersecurity Risks, Regulatory Gaps, and Public Perception in Internet-Connected Vehicles

The rapid advancement of Internet-connected vehicle technologies has introduced a new era of smart mobility, while simultaneously raising significant cybersecurity and privacy concerns. This paper explores the evolving threat landscape associated with connected vehicles, focusing on risks such as...

Automatic License Plate Readers Are Coming to Schools

Fears around children is opening up a new market for automatic license place readers...

Google Will Use AI to Guess People’s Ages Based on Search History

Plus: A former top US cyber official loses her new job due to political backlash, Congress is rushing through a bill to censor lawmakers’ personal information online, and more...

OpenAI kills “short-lived experiment” where ChatGPT chats could be found on Google

A little-known ChatGPT "feature" is now gone. It could be a good thing. On X, OpenAI Chief Information Security Officer Dane Stuckey announced that OpenAI "removed a feature from ChatGPT that allowed users to make their conversations discoverable by search engines, such as Google." Stuckey called...

Trump Administration and Big Tech want you to share your health data

US President Donald Trump announced a loose plan Wednesday to allow Americans to voluntarily upload and port their medical records across hospitals, clinics, technology companies, and health apps, with broad participation from Google, Apple, OpenAI, Amazon, and more. While the system could help...

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...

Taiwan NSB Alerts Public on Data Risks from Douyin, Weibo, and RedNote Over China Ties

Taiwan's National Security Bureau NSB has warned that China-developed applications like RedNote aka Xiaohongshu, Weibo, Douyin, WeChat, and Baidu Cloud pose security risks due to excessive data collection and data transfer to China. The alert comes following an inspection of these apps carried ou...

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...

Facebook’s New AI Tool Asks to Upload Your Photos for Story Ideas, Sparking Privacy Concerns

Facebook, the social network platform owned by Meta, is asking for users to upload pictures from their phones to suggest collages, recaps, and other ideas using artificial intelligence AI, including those that have not been directly uploaded to the service. According to TechCrunch, which first...

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...