It’s legal to scrape public data—US appeals court

Web scraping—the automated extraction of data from websites—has been around for a long time. Simultaneously cursed and praised, with nobody being able to quite land the decisive blow about whether it should be allowed, one way or another. This may have changed, thanks to a recent US appeals court...

Privacy Experts Skeptical of Proposed Data Protection Agency

A new federal bureaucracy, the Data Protection Agency DPA, has been proposed to completely revamp how the U.S. government regulates data collection and misuse by big tech companies. However, while privacy experts call the agency a “good first step,” they remain skeptical about how effective it...

Twitter Uses Phone Numbers, Emails to Sell Ads

Twitter has acknowledged that user phone numbers and email addresses gathered for security purposes, as part of its two-factor authentication policy, may have been used to sell ads. It calls the move an accident. The revelation is being widely criticized for its obvious breach of user privacy,...

Facebook Removed Tens of Thousands of Apps Post-Cambridge Analytica

Facebook said it has suspended tens of thousands of apps as part of its ongoing investigation into how third-party apps on its platform collect, handle and utilize users’ personal data. The results of the investigation, launched in March 2018 in response to Facebook’s infamous Cambridge Analytica...

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...

US Congress proposes comprehensive federal data privacy legislation—finally

The United States might be the only country of its size—both in economy and population—to lack a comprehensive data privacy law protecting its citizens’ online lives. That could change this year. Never-ending cybersecurity breaches, recently-enacted international privacy laws, public outrage, and...

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...

Facebook’s Rough History of Failed User Revolts

Outraged over the latest Facebook privacy flap, half of users polled Tuesday promise to un-friend the social network. We have heard this refrain before. It seems almost weekly now some new dirt about the social media giant’s misuse of consumer data is revealed. Recently, there was the collection ...

Facebook Fined £500,000 for Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal

Facebook has finally been slapped with its first fine of £500,000 for allowing political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica to improperly gather and misuse data of 87 million users. The fine has been imposed by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office ICO and was calculated using the UK's old...

Recent App Issues Reveal Facebook’s Struggles to Temper Data Privacy Woes

Facebook was hit with a double privacy punch regarding data privacy on Wednesday. First, Facebook acknowledged in a public post that one of the apps on its platform, myPersonality, inappropriately shared 4 million users’ data with researchers. Also on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported...

Facebook Faces £500,000 Fine in U.K. Over Cambridge Analytica Leak

Facebook has been fined £500,000 $664,000 in the U.K. after the country's data protection watchdog concluded that its data-sharing scandal broke the law, making it as the social network's first fine over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Yes, £500,000—that's the maximum fine allowed by the UK's Da...

Bug Bounty Programs Turn Attention to Data Abuse

More companies – particularly social media firms – may follow Facebook’s footsteps in turning to bug bounty programs to scout out any data privacy abuse on their platforms, experts say. On the heels of Facebook’s Cambridge-Analytica scandal in March, the social media giant launched a “Data Abuse...

1834: The First Cyberattack

Tom Standage has a great story of the first cyberattack against a telegraph network. The Blanc brothers traded government bonds at the exchange in the city of Bordeaux, where information about market movements took several days to arrive from Paris by mail coach. Accordingly, traders who could ge...

Facebook Offering $40,000 Bounty If You Find Evidence Of Data Leaks

Facebook pays millions of dollars every year to researchers and bug hunters to stamp out security holes in its products and infrastructure, but following Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company today launched a bounty program to reward users for reporting "data abuse" on its platform. The move...

Facebook Cracks Down On Data Misuse With Expanded Bug Bounty Program

Facebook said in the coming weeks it will expand its bug bounty program in an attempt to crackdown on data misuse by third-party app developers. The company’s bug bounty program, first started in 2011, prompts researchers to find vulnerabilities on the social media platform – but now will be...

CVE-2015-6832

Use-after-free vulnerability in the SPL unserialize implementation in ext/spl/splarray.c in PHP before 5.4.44, 5.5.x before 5.5.28, and 5.6.x before 5.6.12 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via crafted serialized data that triggers misuse of an array field...

Lovely-faces.com Dating site takes 250,000 pictures and names of Facebook users !

Creators of a affected dating armpit accept taken claimed advice from 250,000 Facebook profiles - and reproduced it after the ability of the associates of the accepted amusing networking site. Lovely-faces.com uses the names and photos of Facebook associates and again gives users the advantage to...