Roku accused of selling children’s data to advertisers and brokers

The state of Florida has accused Roku, which powers many smart TVs and streaming devices, of selling children's data to third parties without their consent. According to the Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, Roku collected viewing habits, voice recordings, and precise geolocation from kids...

South Korea Fines Meta $15.67M for Illegally Sharing Sensitive User Data with Advertisers

Meta has been fined 21.62 billion won $15.67 million by South Korea's data privacy watchdog for illegally collecting sensitive personal information from Facebook users, including data about their political views and sexual orientation, and sharing it with advertisers without their consent. The...

Why blocking ads is good for your digital health

Online content is largely powered and paid for by advertising. Almost every site you visit, every forum you browse, and even the online stores you buy things from is an advert extravaganza, and they dont just stop at showing cool offers for shirts at 50% off. The scaffolding the adverts sit on go...

How the cops buy a "God view" of your location data, with Bennett Cyphers: Lock and Code S04E09

The list of people and organizations that are hungry for your location data--collected so routinely and packaged so conveniently that it can easily reveal where you live, where you work, where you shop, pray, eat, and relax--includes many of the usual suspects. Advertisers, obviously, want to sen...

Happy 12th Birthday, KrebsOnSecurity.com!

KrebsOnSecurity.com celebrates its 12th anniversary today! Maybe "celebrate" is too indelicate a word for a year wracked by the global pandemics of COVID-19 and ransomware. Especially since stories about both have helped to grow the audience here tremendously in 2021. But this sites birthday also...

What’s Google FLoC? And How Does It Affect Your Privacy?

There’s a battle raging over how advertisers can target us on the web—or whether they should be able to target us at all...

CopperStealer Malware Targets Facebook and Instagram Business Accounts

A malware that until now has gone undocumented has been quietly hijacking online accounts of advertisers and users of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google and other web giants since July 2019 and then using them for nefarious activity, researchers have found. Dubbed CopperStealer, the malware acts...

The Chrome Update Is Bad for Advertisers, but Good for Google

The world’s most popular browser is about to make it a lot harder for advertisers to track your online activity...

IBM Settles Lawsuit Over Weather Channel App Data Privacy

IBM, the owner of the Weather Channel mobile app, has reached a settlement with the Los Angeles city attorney’s office after a 2019 lawsuit alleged that the app was deceiving its users in how it was using their geolocation data. The 2019 lawsuit claimed, the app’s permission prompt for users to...

Thousands of Android Apps Are Silently Accessing Your Data

More than 4,000 Google Play apps let developers and advertisers collect a list of the user's other installed apps, no permission needed...

Facebook's Download-Your-Data Tool Is Incomplete

Privacy International has the details: Key facts: Despite Facebook claim, "Download Your Information" doesn't provide users with a list of all advertisers who uploaded a list with their personal data. As a user this means you can't exercise your rights under GDPR because you don't know which...

Unencrypted Mobile Traffic on Tor Network Leaks PII

Unencrypted, sensitive and confidential user data originating from millions of mobile devices is carried on the Tor network every day. Now researchers say they have devised away to scoop up that data and create personal profiles for specific mobile users, that include GPS coordinates, web...

Police Use of Facial Recognition is Just Fine, Say Most Americans

Despite the appetite for dystopian surveillance dramas on TV and in film, most Americans actually do trust law enforcement to not abuse facial recognition technology, according to a new survey. According to the Pew Research Center, a full 56 percent said that they trust police and officials to us...

Facebook Sues Two Android App Developers for Click Injection Fraud

Facebook has filed a lawsuit against two shady Android app developers accused of making illegal money by hijacking users' smartphones to fraudulently click on Facebook ads. According to Facebook, Hong Kong-based 'LionMobi' and Singapore-based 'JediMobi' app developers were distributing malicious...

Weather Channel App in a Deluge of Legal Trouble for Data Misuse

A lawsuit filed Thursday alleges that the popular Weather Channel App misled its users about how it would use the personal – and extremely precise – location data that it collects. IBM subsidiary The Weather Channel TWC markets its free app as the world’s most downloaded weather app, touting 45...

Beyond the Looking Glass - The OTT Evolution in India

India, while at the cusp of becoming a digital, mobile first country, is also in the middle of evolving content consumption patterns. Hotstar's India Watch Report states that the video consumption in the country has seen a five-fold growth in just one year, with most of this growth is fuelled by...

GDPR causes a flood of new policies

The European Union claims that the General Data Protection Regulation GDPR, which comes to term on May 25, is the most important change in data privacy regulation in 20 years. Many companies have spent months preparing for the changes, working on policy and compliance, and introducing changes to...

VPN 101 – Part 1: What You Need to Know to Stay Safe and Protect Your Privacy Online

Submitted by Brook Stein The Internet is a wonderful thing. But we all know there are also risks lurking around every corner. We want to protect ourselves from malware and identity theft, prevent third-party trackers and advertisers slurping our private information, and keep our kids safe when...

Hotspot Shield VPN accused of redirecting user traffic to advertisers

By Waqas A renowned privacy group Center for Democracy Technology CDT has This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Hotspot Shield VPN accused of redirecting user traffic to advertisers...

Complaint Alleges Hotspot Shield VPN Engages in Deceptive Trade Practices

A complaint has been filed with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission alleging that a free VPN service marketed as a provider of secure and anonymous internet access shares user data and redirects traffic to partners, including online advertising companies. The Center for Democracy and Technology CDT...