Microsoft Edge received the lowest privacy rating in a recently published study that compared the user information collected by major browsers.Edge also sends the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft and Yandex similarly transmits a hashed hardware identifier to back end servers.

Through a project called Digital Transparency in the Public Realm, or DTPR, the company is demonstrating a set of icons, to be displayed in public spaces, that shows where and what kinds of data are being collected.

Amidst the millions of social media users is a sizable chunk well-acquainted with what I’ll call “post-post anxiety.” It’s a dreadful malady, really; with symptoms that come on after you’ve fired off a tweet or pic that is, on second-thought, offensive or unflattering.

A declassified study by the intelligent community’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board shared with Congress this week revealed that the metadata program cost $100 million, and only on two occasions produced information that the FBI didn’t already possess.

In the Foo Camp session, Stanford Law School’s Nate Persily, cohead of Social Science One, said that after 20 months of negotiations, Facebook was finally releasing the data to researchers.

It is in the clear interest of policymakers, organizations, and the public to receive feedback from security researchers directly, instead of risking the information reaching other potentially malicious parties.

And flaws in a widely used Cisco protocol have put millions of workplace phones, routers, and network switches at risk .On the lighter side of hacking—well, it's all relative—artist Simon Weckert fooled Google Maps into thinking there was a traffic jam in Berlin by carting around 99 smartphones in little red wagon .

That existing model allows companies and advertisers at least some access to marketing data; one argument for preserving it is that if browsers become too restrictive, those parties will pull content from the open web and move it to mobile apps instead.

A Disturbing Look at a Massive Facial Recognition DatabaseThere are really two stories worth reading about Clearview AI, a company that claims to have scraped 3 billion images from the internet—including social media sites—to power an unprecedented facial recognition database.

Barnett, along with executives from Basecamp, Sonos, and Tile, testified at a high-profile congressional hearing in Boulder, Colorado, Friday where they told lawmakers how the anticompetitive practices of Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple have negatively impacted their businesses.

All software has flaws, and Facebook quickly pushed a fix for this one—but not before word got around on message boards like 4chan, where people posted screenshots that doxed the accounts behind prominent pages.

The Trump administration Wednesday reaffirmed its policy to maintain a light touch in regulating self-driving vehicles , with a new document that is long on promoting the industry and silent on rules governing testing or operating the vehicles.

So, for a data market to succeed, individual data creators—whether enterprises or consumers—will need tools to set their own privacy terms and conditions.

But as the mechanisms of the law get finalized, and depending on how it’s enforced, its impact could go a long way to determining whether the 2020s become the decade when the US started taking privacy seriously.

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.

Finally Twitter has relented, allowing you to get started with two-factor authentication straight from an authenticator app or Yubikey , no phone number required.To do so, go to Twitter on the web, and click Settings & Privacy > Account > Security > Two-Factor Authentication .

Bringing user data concerns into antitrust, as Delrahim suggested, would require asking a similar question: Will the reduction in competition lead to consumers having to accept inferior privacy protections?.

As Mark Zuckerberg testified about all things Facebook on the House side of the Capitol last week, over on the Senate side some lawmakers were debating whether CEOs like Zuckerberg should face jail time if their companies misuse people’s personal data.“You know, my sense is that Mark Zuckerberg is not going to take American’s privacy seriously unless he and others in these positions face personal consequences,” senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) told WIRED in his Capitol Hill office.

In 1904, a group of Canadian workers began the hard slog of constructing the world's longest bridge, across the Saint Lawrence River just south of the city of Quebec.

The hacker apparently got in through a bug in forum software vBulletin; the Dutch Broadcast Foundation reports that the hacker has attempted to sell the data online.But he also took the time to comb through the malware's code, and stole a database full of decryption keys from the hacking group's server.

They found that 89 percent of Amazon Fire TV channels and 69 percent of Roku channels contained easily spottable trackers that collected information about a viewing habits and preferences, along with unique identifiers like device serial numbers and IDs, Wi-Fi network names, and the Wi-Fi identifiers known as MAC addresses.

The bill would ban the use of facial recognition algorithms in real time, when the body cameras are rolling, and in subsequent forensic analysis of footage.

We took a look at a bug in Supermicro hardware that could let hackers pull off a USB attack virtually.Several DMVs told Motherboard that at least they don't also sell user photos and Social Security numbers, which, thanks?

At the time, WIRED wrote : “The complaint claims that a significant portion of popular content on YouTube is designed for kids, whose personal information—including IP address, geolocation, and persistent identifiers used to track users across sites—is unlawfully collected by Google and then used to target ads.” Google’s settlement, which was first reported by Politico, would far exceed the record for children’s privacy violations set by TikTok ’s $5.7 million fine earlier this year.

Employees at a Nuclear Power Plant Mined Cryptocurrency on the Job. Cryptojackers—the hackers who insert themselves into networks to mine cryptocurrency—have targeted critical infrastructure before .The bad news is that they exposed the plant to the broader internet, which is understandably not ideal for high-security nuclear plants.

Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, and David Baser, the director of product management, noted in a blog post that the new tool “could have some impact” on Facebook’s business, but that “giving people control over their data is more important.”.

Three US cities, including San Francisco , recently blocked their agencies from using the technology altogether, while federal lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have expressed interest in regulating facial recognition.#facial recognition #Artificial Intelligence #algorithms #privacy.

Right now it’s unclear what form Apple’s Siri opt-out will take; the company has suspended its voice data collection temporarily and says only that once it resumes, “users will have the ability to choose to participate.” Apple didn’t respond to a request for more specific information.

The Guardian Firewall app runs in the background of an iOS device, and stymies data and location trackers while compiling a list of all the times your apps attempt to deploy them.

But Rotenberg notes that without a comprehensive data breach response plan within the federal government, a settlement like Equifax's may not have been much more effective even with an FTC fine.