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No phone taps on WhatsApp is whack, moan spymasters European ministers are debating a clampdown on encryption and a further increase in surveillance in response to mounting terrorist threats.…

<p>Het publiceren van geheime documenten van autoriteiten brengt nevenschade aan &#8216;gewone&#8217; burgers toe, blijkt uit onderzoek van AP.</p>

Microsoft's deceptive hard-sell to gets users to "upgrade" to Windows 10 (the most control-freaky OS to ever come out of Redmond) is made all the more awful by just how much personal, sensitive, compromising data Microsoft exfiltrates from its users' PCs once they make the switch. (more…)

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Backpack ban for Oktoberfest beer bash Germany's interior minister Thomas de Maiziere wants facial recognition systems in the country's airports and train stations to identify terror suspects.…

I ran across this article today which might interest some LQ members! http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/privacy-lawsuit-over-gmail-will-move-forward/

How do experienced Linux users maintain their privacy? Encryption, password protected documents, security, hardening...? What can one do about spyware, remote access, hackers, computer...

Researchers use online photos to create 3-D renders of faces and successfully dupe four facial recognition systems. The post Hackers Trick Facial-Recognition Logins With Photos From Facebook (What Else?) appeared first on WIRED.

Drones have the potential to revolutionize our lives in many ways. However, some people have concerns. In the case of drone technology, one we hear often is the possible invasion of privacy. After months of discussions, a collaborative process resulted in a consensus set of voluntary best practices that balance people’s rights to operate drones with all of our rights to privacy. Read More

Published at LXer: Slams 'questionable tactics to cause users to download software many didn’t want'The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has called on Microsoft to offer a “single unified...

With ISPs like AT&T now charging broadband customers a steep premium just to protect their own privacy, the FCC has begun looking at some relatively basic new privacy protections for broadband. This has, as you might expect, resulted in a notable bump in histrionics from the industry. Comcast, for example, quickly tried to inform the FCC that charging users a surcharge for privacy was ok because it would somehow magically lower broadband prices, and banning them from this kind of behavior would do a tremendous disservice to the internet at large.

Slams 'questionable tactics to cause users to download software many didn’t want' The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has called on Microsoft to offer a “single unified screen” on which Windows 10 users can control how Windows 10 deals with their personal information and monitors their use of the OS.…

A precedential decision [PDF] by Ontario's Court of Appeals concerning the privacy of SMS messages sounds more worrying than it actually is. Here's Vice Canada's opening paragraph on the ruling:

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From Siri to Alexa, voice interfaces are becoming increasingly common, but for all their recent advances, they often struggle with one of the most basic characteristics of human speech: accents. The problem is so prevalent that computer scientists have identified the existence of a "machine voice," a standardized way of speaking that individuals with accents adopt in the hope of being understood. Researchers even warn about the existence of a "speech divide" that ostracizes individuals whose accents differ from those the machines have been trained on.As is often the case with technology built on large data sets, the problem begins with the input. If you only train your interface using a narrow selection of voices, then it won't know... Continue reading…

New plaintiffs hope to push ahead with a class of people who never used Gmail.

We've already made it quite clear where we stand on Peter Thiel financing a number of lawsuits against Gawker Media as some sort of retaliation for some articles he didn't like. Lots of people who really hate Gawker don't seem to care how problematic Thiel's actions are, but you should be concerned, even if you dislike Gawker -- in part, because many of the lawsuits Thiel appears to be backing are clearly bogus and just designed to bankrupt the company, which happened a couple months ago.

Your speech-recognizing friends at Nuance are back with a major update to their flagship app, Dragon. The popular productivity software is now in its 15th version, an update that promises some substantial improvements in accuracy courtesy of the company’s own deep learning tech, which forms the basis of its speech engine. According to Nuance, this latest upgrade brings… Read More

Earlier this month Comcast told the FCC that the cable company wanted to be able to charge broadband customers a premium for privacy, and that blocking the ISP from doing so would hurt broadband adoption, raise broadband prices, and harm consumers. While Comcast was justly mocked for this position, many didn't realize that this is something AT&T has been doing for years, the ISP charging its U-Verse broadband customers $30 to $50 more every month if they want to opt out of "AT&T Preferences," a deep packet inspection snoopvertising service that tracks user behavior all around the Internet.

The blog network's legal trial and subsequent bankruptcy will have long-lasting effects on journalists and ordinary citizens alike. The post Sex, Privacy, and Videotape: Lessons of Gawker's Downfall appeared first on WIRED.

Eurocrats, tech sector face off over future of ePrivacy Directive The tussle over the future of the ePrivacy Directive is warming up: while tech and telcos want the directive relaxed or scrapped, the European Union is considering extending it to cover services like WhatsApp and Skype.…

By the time the law caught up with him, Ronald Carnes had been on the run for 40 years. He’d been moving from state to state after escaping from a North Carolina prison in 1973, finally landing in Waterloo, Iowa, under a pair of assumed names.He probably could have spent the rest of his life that way if it weren’t for a facial recognition program in the Iowa Department of Motor Vehicles. Scanning through the driver’s license database, the program found Carnes’ face in the system under two different names, tipping police off to the fraud. Continue reading…

Apple CEO Tim Cook has said he developed his “moral sense” growing up in rural Alabama in the ‘60s and ‘70s — a period of incredible social upheaval.

As the Internet of Things becomes more widespread, consumers must demand better security and privacy protections that don’t leave them vulnerable to corporate surveillance and data breaches. But before consumers can demand change, they must be informed — which requires companies to be more transparent. Read More

UC London's offering a tax-free stipend for UK/EU students to work on designing and evaluating new approaches for continuous authentication, based on a solid theoretical underpinning so as to give a high degree of confidence that the resulting decisions match expectations and requirements" as well as "ways to preserve user privacy by processing behavioural measurements on the user’s computer such that sensitive information is not sent to the online service." (Image: LordHarris, CC-BY-SA) (Thanks, William!)

Microsoft und Salesforce gehören zu den ersten Unternehmen, die Daten zwischen EU und USA unter dem Schutz des Privacy Shield übertragen wollen.

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Developers warn that cary people are out there doing this already Scientists have found a way to accurately identify completely obscured faces using recognition systems trained on only a handful of well lit photos.…

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Having nothing to hide doesn't mean you should ignore your privacy. Especially when keeping messages secure and private is so easy.An Ontario Court of Appeals has ruled that your SMS messages are not private and once "sent to the ether" are no longer under your control. Vice has a full write up about the decision that interested parties should read, but the short version is this: SMS messages are like email and not subject to the same protection that voice calls have. They aren't a private conversation, and you shouldn't keep thinking they are private. An Ontario Court of Appeals has ruled that your SMS messages are not private and once "sent to the ether" are no longer under your control.This has some far-reaching implications for some folks, while others won't care because they "have nothing to hide" or don't care what happens in a Canadian court. But we all should be concerned, and now is a perfect time for you and the people you talk with to switch to something else. P...

Oi! Statistics wonks ... please explain that foreign 'attack' ... Hard on the heels of endorsing the Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS') process for the 2016 Census, Australia's privacy commissioner Timothy Pilgrim has had second thoughts and launched an investigation into its failure.…

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650 phones are "a brick to us... Those are cases unmade, evidence unfound."

Our world looks very different from when Steve Jobs held aloft the first iPhone in 2007. Marketers didn’t use technology beyond their website analytics, email marketing and display ads. It’s clear that the era of data-driven marketing is just getting started — and privacy is rapidly becoming the defining issue of the digital era. Read More

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You may have heard that tomorrow is the official day for the Australian census to take place... and many people are planning to ignore it, because of massive security concerns and some incredibly stupid plans by the Aussie government to retain and make use of the data collected. Having an accurate population census is an extremely important tool for a wide range of government services, but especially in an age of increasing (and very legitimate) concerns about government overreach and surveillance, some are reasonably worried about what's done with the data. In the US, it's been made quite clear that census data absolutely must be kept secret and not connected to individuals or used for other purposes.

You may have heard that tomorrow is the official day for the Australian census to take place... and many people are planning to ignore it, because of massive security concerns and some incredibly stupid plans by the Aussie government to retain and make use of the data collected. Having an accurate population census is an extremely important tool for a wide range of government services, but especially in an age of increasing (and very legitimate) concerns about government overreach and surveillance, some are reasonably worried about what's done with the data. In the US, it's been made quite clear that census data absolutely must be kept secret and not connected to individuals or used for other purposes.

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Brit overseers not interested, so groups ask ECHR instead Having failed in its bid to block GCHQ's hacking activities at the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal, advocacy group Privacy International says it will now take its fight with the UK government to the European Court of Human Rights.…

A few years back, we noted how AT&T had begun charging broadband users a significant premium if they wanted to opt out of the company's Internet Essentials advertising program. Under that program, AT&T uses deep packet inspection to track consumer browsing behavior around the Internet -- down to the second. By default, AT&T users are opted in to the program. If they want to opt out of this data collection, consumers need to not only navigate a confusing array of options, but they also need to pay $44 to $62 more per month. AT&T, in typical fashion, has actually claimed this is a "discount."

Careful what you tell Azure: Redmond has given itself the right to spam your buddies Microsoft has updated its privacy policy and, for the first time, added a section devoted to “Enterprise Products.”…