The US Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination does not prohibit police officers from forcing a suspect to unlock a phone with a thumbprint scan, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The ruling does not apply to all cases in which biometrics are used to unlock an electronic device but is a significant decision in an unsettled area of the law.
Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have started offering optional features in their connected-car apps that rate people’s driving. Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis.
Automakers and data brokers that have partnered to collect detailed driving data from millions of Americans say they have drivers’ permission to do so. But the existence of these partnerships is nearly invisible to drivers, whose consent is obtained in fine print and murky privacy policies that few read.
Especially troubling is that some drivers with vehicles made by G.M. say they were tracked even when they did not turn on the feature — called OnStar Smart Driver — and that their insurance rates went up as a result.
A mother in Alabama said parents couldn’t ignore the reality of this new economy.
“Social media is the way of our future, and I feel like they’ll be behind if they don’t know what’s going on,” the mother said. “You can’t do anything without it now.”
One 12-year-old girl in Maryland, who spoke with The Times alongside her mother, described the thrill of seeing other girls she knows wear a brand she represents in Instagram posts.
“People are actually being influenced by me,” she said.
One of the biggest looming threats to many forms of encryption is quantum computing. The strength of the algorithms used in virtually all messaging apps relies on mathematical problems that are easy to solve in one direction and extremely hard to solve in the other. Unlike a traditional computer, a quantum computer with sufficient resources can solve these problems in considerably less time.
No one knows how soon that day will come. One common estimate is that a quantum computer with 20 million qubits (a basic unit of measurement) will be able to crack a single 2,048-bit RSA key in about eight hours. The biggest known quantum computer to date has 433 qubits.
Whenever that future arrives, cryptography engineers know it’s inevitable. They also know that it’s likely some adversaries will collect and stockpile as much encrypted data now and decrypt it once quantum advances allow for it. The moves by both Apple and Signal aim to defend against that eventuality using Kyber, one of several PQC algorithms currently endorsed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Apple is a corporation and I am proud of their stance on user privacy.
The National Security Agency (NSA) has admitted to buying records from data brokers detailing which websites and apps Americans use, US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) revealed Thursday.
Getting your DNA or your loved ones’ DNA sequenced means you are potentially putting people who are related to those people at risk in ways that are easily predictable, but also in ways we cannot yet predict because these databases are still relatively new. I am writing this article right now because of the hack, but my stance on this issue has been the same for years, for reasons outside of the hack.
The location tracking stuff? Sadly unavoidable (if we want to use cell phones). Cell phones cannot work without location triangulation between the nearest cell towers. If you have a cell phone, smart or dumb, your location is being tracked.
And with the legislative mandate that all cellular-capable devices be capable of making emergency calls even if they don’t have a cell account attached to them, every phone, every cellular watch, every cellular-enabled vehicle is trackable.
Privacy is dead. Computers made that all-but-inevitable. But this is not normal.
If we become accustomed to this (which we have), we will have lost something essential to the resistance of tyranny. Let’s hope our government is never run by an autocratic politician with fascist aims.
…a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.
You’d be a fool to use anything other than FaceTime Audio, Signal, or another encrypted communication service.
Christ, Apple. Have some faith that people use your phones because they’re the best on the market, not because they’re locked into iMessage. 🤦🏼♂️
I’m all for security — end-to-end encryption is table stakes at this point, and I won’t use anything without it to meaningfully communicate — but inhibiting innovation solely to protect a monopoly of a marketplace (in this case, the App Store)? C’mon.
Apple, you have the technical expertise to protect people’s data even if they sideload. It won’t be easy, I know, but come on.
Give people a choice.
On the other hand, my work is tech-adjacent and my passions are obviously tech-y. I work with a lot of people — smart, professional people — that don’t know shit about the phones in their pocket, not least of all how to safeguard them.
If smart people can’t be bothered to protect themselves, no doubt sideloading will invite bad actors (i.e. advertisers) to get people to download software that tracks the hell out of them. More than it already does.
So maybe Apple has a point.
But the least they could do is lower their 30% App Store commission. It’s difficult to take anyone arguing the moral high ground seriously when they’re making such an extreme profit from their position.
When you deploy Contact Key Verification with someone you already know, you upgrade an existing conversation from “I think I know this person” to “I know this person, and we now have an out-of-band encryption verification step to keep our conversations secure and tamper resistant.”
All you have to do is pull up an existing conversation and then use some trusted method to read the provided code, as you can see below. If the code matches, you each tap Mark As Verified.
Small-but-important changes in the world of digital journalism, and not a moment too soon.
Who is peeking over your shoulder while you work, watch videos, learn, explore, and shop on the internet? Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data. You may be surprised at what you learn.
If, back in 2003, government surveillance had reached a point that many of us felt the need to self-censor, today it’s private citizens who are imposing the censorship regime. Online mobs savage people for making an insensitive remark, communities shun people for asking questions. The desire to speak freely and without fear is driving not only the creation of platforms like Substack, but actual migration patterns. This is what happens when surveillance and social control are pervasive enough: True enemies, like al-Qaida, are replaced by boogeymen like @TrumpDyke, and dubious figments like “disinformation” supplant real threats like terror. The zealous among us begin policing speech so the actual police don’t have to, and the press, the inevitable organ of every authoritarian regime, either turns a blind eye or actively colludes with the government and its partners to smother unsanctioned views.
We lost a lot for choosing not to have a dialogue about government overreach back in 2013, when Snowden revealed the government’s mass surveillance programs. “Study after study has shown that human behavior changes when we know we’re being watched,” he once said. “Under observation, we act less free, which means we are less free.” Maybe you hesitated to do a search on Google, or say something in an email because you thought someone might intercept it. After Snowden, writers admitted to turning down work out of the mere possibility of surveillance. The “war on terror” had a chilling effect on speech, which was bad enough. Fast forward to 2020, and scientists were voluntarily taking themselves out of the lockdown debate. If in 2013, we lost a core American value when we chose not to take up the cause of privacy, in 2020, we lost jobs and lives.
This VPN map shows the relationships between VPN companies, their corporate owners, and paid affiliates who profit from reviewing them positively. It includes information on latest community news, ownership changes, and is updated periodically. Every proven relationship between media companies, content sites, corporate VPNs, and independent VPNs that we could find.
My VPN of choice? Disconnect. Not on this map because it’s not owned by another company nor does it collect your browsing history or any other information about you. Support them if you can.
“We do not share SAT scores or GPAs with Facebook or TikTok, and any other third parties using pixel or cookies,” said a College Board spokesperson. “In fact, we do not send any personally identifiable information (PII) through our pixels on the site. In addition, we do not use SAT scores or GPAs for any targeting.”
After receiving this comment, Gizmodo shared a screenshot of the College Board sending GPAs and SAT scores to TikTok using a pixel. The spokesperson then acknowledged that the College Board’s website actually does share this data.
According to tax forms, 14 of the College Board’s 17 executives made more than $300,000 in 2021. Together, CEO David Coleman and President Jeremy Singer made $1,782,254.
A bit of good ol’ gumshoe reporting by Gizmodo, proving there’s something left inside the husks of Gawker Media.
What bullshit on the part of the College Board. Disgusting.
Remember: online, everything you do is tracked.
Everything.
If you aren’t paying for an online service, you are the product being sold.
(TikTok is ByteDance, a Chinese company that reports directly to the Chinese Communist Party. We’re selling out our own children…for what? So the execs of the College Board can have a new vacation home?)