Modern TVs have “unprecedented capabilities for surveillance and manipulation,” group reveals

Your television is debuting the latest, most captivating program: You. In a report titled “How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era,” the Center for Digital Democracy CDD spotlighted a massive data-driven surveillance apparatus that ensnares the public through modern...

Privacy Sandbox Initiative: Google to Phase Out Third-Party Cookies Starting 2024

Google has announced plans to officially flip the switch on its twice-delayed Privacy Sandbox initiatives as it slowly works its way to deprecate support for third-party cookies in Chrome browser. To that end, the search and advertising giant said it intends to phase out third-party cookies for 1...

Twitter Used Two-Factor Login Details for Ad Targeting

Twitter was fined $150 million for using phone numbers and email addresses collected for two-factor authentication for ad targeting...

Google Will Use 'FLoC' for Ad Targeting Once 3rd-Party Cookies Are Dead

Signaling a major shift to its ads-driven business model, Google on Wednesday unequivocally stated it would not build alternate identifiers or tools to track users across multiple websites once it begins phasing out third-party tracking cookies from its Chrome browser by early 2022. "Instead, our...

A Ban on Ad Targeting: Why Did EU Regulators Call for It?

By Waqas Brands use ad targeting to attract potential customers but is it an ethical approach? Why is the EU asking for a ban on ad targeting? This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: A Ban on Ad Targeting: Why Did EU Regulators Call for It?...

Ditch Your Data-Hungry Apps for These Privacy-Focused Swaps

From messaging to maps, many popular apps slurp up your data to sell you ads. There’s a better way...

Apple Safari Blocks Ad-Targeting Cookie Support

Apple has released an update to its Safari browser that blocks third-party cookies, following an announcement by Google that it would do the same for its Chrome browser. Through the release of Safari 13.1 on Tuesday, alongside some changes to Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention ITP in iOS and...

Google to Nix Chrome Support for Third-Party Cookies by 2022

Google has set an aggressive two-year deadline for dropping support for third-party tracking cookies in its Chrome web browser. Tracking cookies, which allow advertisers to virtually follow people around the web, are used for ad targeting. The move follows a number of privacy hardening steps by...

Twitter Puts Profit Ahead of User Privacy—Just Like Facebook Did Before

Twitter funneled two-factor authentication phone numbers into their ad targeting platform—but they weren't the only ones...

Facebook May Face $5 Billion FTC Fine for Data Misuse

UPDATE Facebook may be facing fines as high as $5 billion after a year-long Federal Trade Commission FTC investigation into its data-security practices. Though it wasn’t mentioned in its earnings call on Wednesday, the social-media giant in a release for its Q1 2019 earnings said that it was...

Threatpost News Wrap Podcast For Aug. 31

The Threatpost team breaks down the biggest news for the week ending on August 31. Topics covered are a Microsoft Windows zero-day, Yahoo’s recent acknowledgement that it scans emails to target ads to a report that mobile app SDKs capture private data when an Android or iOS app crashes. Download...

Yahoo Persists in Scanning Emails for In-Depth Ad-Targeting

While the rest of the U.S. tech industry is taking steps to assuage consumer concerns over privacy and data-harvesting, Yahoo is selling off the ability to scan more than 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes for rich user data that might be used for marketing purposes. Verizon’s Oath unit, which owns...

Facebook, GDPR and the Right to Privacy: Three’s a Crowd?

Back in 2016 the European Union voted to pass the mother of all security laws, aimed at further extending the rights of its citizens to control how their data is used. The General Data Protection Regulation GDPR guards users against having their information shared without their explicit consent,...

Podcast: How Millions of Apps Leak Private Data

SAN FRANCISCO – Threatpost’s Tom Spring talked to Roman Unuchek, senior malware analyst at Kaspersky Lab, about new research on leaky apps made public this week. Unuchek released his research at the RSA conference this week, revealing that millions of apps leak personal identifiable information –...

Hundreds of Apps Using Ultrasonic Signals to Silently Track Smartphone Users

Your smartphone may have some apps that are continuously listening inaudible, high-frequency ultrasonic sounds from your surroundings and they know where you go, what you like and dislike — all without your knowledge. Ultrasonic Cross-Device Tracking is a new technology that some marketers and...

WhatsApp to Share Your Data with Facebook — You have 30 Days to Stop It

Nothing comes for Free, as "Free" is just a relative term used by companies to develop a strong user base and then use it for their own benefits. The same has been done by the secure messaging app WhatsApp, which has now made it crystal clear that the popular messaging service will begin sharing...

Researchers Tie Pirrit Adware to Israeli Marketing Company

Researchers have linked a variant of the Pirrit adware for Mac OS X to an Israeli online marketing company called TargetingEdge that is still in stealth mode. Amit Serper, lead Linux and Mac OS X researcher at Cybereason, said that script he wrote to remove the original version of Pirrit from...

Verizon Allows Opt Out of UIDH Mobile Supercookie

Verizon Wireless has made a change that now allows customers to opt out of the ad-targeting program that relies on the so-called supercookie identifier that was inserted into Web requests users send. The use of the identifier, known as a UIDH, drew the ire of privacy advocates and users when it w...

Study Finds Popular Sites Guilty of Hi-Jacking History

A recent study launched by the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science to determine the scope of privacy-violating information flows at popular websites shows that popular Web 2.0 applications such as mashups, aggregators, and sophisticated ad targeting are teeming with various kinds of...