Police around the country have drastically increased their use of geofence warrants , a widely criticized investigative technique that collects data from any user's device that was in a specified area within a certain time range, according to new figures shared by Google.

Chris Tucker, chairman of the American Geographical Society, a private research and advocacy group, says the Locus Charter aims to capture the potential benefits and risks of a world of invisible real-time tracking: from your weather app to the GPS system in your car, or at an international level, state-supported contact-tracing apps that keep tabs on people worldwide.

You see, Davies, along with conservation scientist Emily Duncan of the University of Exeter and other researchers, had not long before released the bottle and nine others into the Ganges as part of a clever experiment to show how plastic pollution moves through rivers and eventually out to sea.

The US Military Buys Location Data From a Popular Muslim Prayer AppFor years, shadowy companies have been buying and selling your location data based on what apps you use.

When an app first asks for permission to track location, the option to enable this all the time (even when the app isn't running) isn't available: You need to visit the app's specific page in Android Settings to do this.

If you open Settings in iOS 14 and then choose Privacy and Location Services , you can tap on an app to configure how it can access your phone's location: never, always, only when the app is open, or only when you give explicit permission.

Several of the watches had even more severe vulnerabilities, allowing hackers to send voice and text messages to children that appear to come from their parents, to intercept communications between parents and children, and even to record audio from a child's surroundings and eavesdrop on them.

Proactive earthquake alerts will only be in California for now (which already has ShakeAlert and an established data set), and Google says that "over the coming year, you can expect to see the earthquake alerts coming to more states and countries using Android’s phone-based earthquake detection.".

Every Saturday we round up the security and privacy stories that we didn’t break or report on in depth but think you should know about.How the NSA Keeps Phones Safe From TrackingThis week, the National Security Agency shared a three-page primer on how to limit your location data exposure.

Writing in the journal PNAS, researchers from several California universities describe how they used anonymized cell phone location data and census info to show a dramatic reversal in how mobile Americans have been this year.

“Most of the vessels operating do not use this and are ‘dark,’ meaning they don’t appear in public surveillance systems, and the ones that did broadcast did so relatively infrequently,” says David Kroosdma, director of research and innovation at the international nonprofit Global Fishing Watch and coauthor of the study.

“Most of the vessels operating do not use this and are ‘dark,’ meaning they don’t appear in public surveillance systems, and the ones that did broadcast did so relatively infrequently,” says David Kroosdma, director of research and innovation at international nonprofit Global Fishing Watch and co-author of the study.

And the release of Android 11 is particularly focused on expanding privacy improvements to give you more control over what your apps can access and giving more ways to distribute software updates across Android's fragmented and disjointed device population.

But the next iteration of the app will build in the ability to sort all the recorded locations of any users diagnosed as Covid-19 positive into "tiles" of a few square miles, and then cryptographically "hash" each piece of location and time data.

In the fall of 2016, Kaye's distributed denial of service attacks launched gargantuan waves of junk traffic from his botnet of half a million hijacked internet-connected security cameras, one of several botnets known as Mirai, at the Liberian telecom network Lonestar.

Operated by NuScale Power, an Oregon-based energy startup, this prototype reactor represents a new chapter in the conflict-ridden, politically bedeviled saga of nuclear power plants .NuScale’s reactor won’t need massive cooling towers or sprawling emergency zones.

For alleged Evil Corp leader Maksim Yakubets, it came this week, as US and UK authorities charged him and an associate with hacking thefts that totaled over $100 million.Security journalist Brian Krebs noted that the iPhone 11 and 11 Plus check in on your location even when you turn off all location-related settings.

The researchers from Purdue University and the University of Iowa are detailing 11 new design issues in 5G protocols that could expose your location, downgrade your service to old mobile data networks, run up your wireless bills, or even track when you make calls, text, or browse the web.

The image of Phoenix’s Joker dancing on those stairs has been a meme since the internet first laid eyes on it, which was in April, when the bit was used for promotional materials like the Joker movie’s poster and trailer.

Not only were they the first spacecraft to visit the asteroid belt, Jupiter, and Saturn; they even carried with them a plaque that carried a message on behalf of all humankind.

Every weekday, WIRED publishes a new cartoon about the worlds of science and technology.And if that's still not enough, you can find all of WIRED's cartoons in one place, right here .Plus, sign up for the Daily newsletter and never miss the best of WIRED.

“Snow ‘scavenges’ the particles in the air and brings them down,” says marine ecologist Melanie Bergmann of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, lead author of a new paper in Science Advances .

Material Safety Data Sheets, the chemical equivalent of technology user terms and conditions, have offered descriptions of those hazards since the early 1900s.Even if users don’t read the safety data sheet, they are greeted by this bright, unavoidable summary of material hazards every time they look at the container.

“When you invite this technology to mediate your care relations of whatever kind, you’re also inviting it to do so through its own limited bandwidth, it’s own limited algorithms,” says Natasha Schüll, a professor of media culture and communication at NYU and author of the book Addiction by Design .

The new app that creeps on your Instagram location, Jakarta is sinking, and all things Comic Con. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less.

With a few seconds of physical access to a phone, even apps as common as Google Maps and Apple's Find My Friends can be tweaked to persistently share a user's location with another contact while offering the phone's owner no notification or warning, the researchers told me.

In a background phone call with WIRED following that keynote, Apple broke down that privacy element, explaining how its "encrypted and anonymous" system avoids leaking your location data willy nilly, even as your devices broadcast a Bluetooth signal explicitly designed to let you track your device.

The company says its understanding of the real-time locations of millions of phones has helped Subway determine how physical coupons affect in-store visits and segment users into custom audience categories based on the types of locations they visit regularly, per Foursquare’s website.

Both are structured in the same way as Voice & Audio Activity , with options to erase records one by one, a day at a time, or all together via the Delete activity by link, if you click Manage activity .You do have options when it comes to temporarily stopping Google tracking you, as well—staying signed out when using YouTube for example, not signing into Google Chrome, or using incognito mode when searching and browsing in Chrome.

Back in the Minecraft offices in Redmond, Washington, where they shared a building with Halo studio 343 Industries, the team would put people in the HoloLens and then send AR sheep walking down the hallway toward them—“slowly, certainly not threateningly,” Persson says now, sitting in a conference room right next to that hallway.