Privacy

Wired tells the story of California detectives who tried to use facial recognition to identify a face made with machine learning and crime scene DNA by phenotyping company Parabon NanoLabs. That’s not a good idea, said Parabon’s director of bioinformatics, Ellen Greytak:

Not only did InMarket Media sell precise location data without asking users for their consent, the data broker didn’t inform the third-party apps using its SDK, the FTC found.

Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel wrote letters to nine major automakers, including GM, Toyota, Ford, and Tesla, to ask what kind of data they collect about their drivers and how they protect their privacy. Rosenworcel sent similar letters to Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, too.

The company has issued a response to the customers who are now suing it over last year’s breach. In a letter obtained by TechCrunch, the company says the hack “was not a result of 23andMe’s alleged failure to maintain reasonable security measures” and instead had to do with users’ failure to reset their passwords.

In August, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers denied Google’s attempt to end a class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 that claims it illegally invaded the privacy of millions by tracking browsing activity even with “incognito mode” activated in Chrome and other browsers.

The company says in its announcement that the app, which uses Nord’s WireGuard-based NordLynx VPN protocol, will let users watch shows they’re following while abroad and prevent ISPs from identifying and throttling streaming content.

The New York Times published an investigative piece on the slave labor behind some of those innocuous-seeming crypto scam texts and calls.

Hot off a recent Utah Supreme Court decision, legal blogger Orin Kerr lays out the legal conundrum around whether you can be legally compelled to provide a passcode or password (and how that’s actually slightly different from, but closely related to, having to unlock your phone):

A month after Meta announced new subscriptions that give users the choice between paying or giving their “consent” to being tracked and shown ads, the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) and 18 of its members have filed a complaint, Reuters reports. “People should not be asked to pay for protecting their privacy,” it says. A first step in what’s likely to be a long legal battle.

ABC News in Australia reported that Dr. Janice Duffy settled with Google after winning two lawsuits alleging defamation — one in 2015 and one earlier this year.

Kashmir Hill, author of the book Your Face Belongs to Us and “not a privacy nihilist,” spoke to Nilay on Decoder about whether or not we can do anything about the rise of a facial recognition-enabled dystopian world.

In certain situations, like using Gmail, Google News, Assistant, Contacts, or Google TV, personal data will be combined across different services it offers or with data from non-Google sources.

New York State Education Department Commissioner Betty A. Rosa has issued an order prohibiting New York State schools from purchasing or using facial recognition technology. Schools may use other forms of biometric identification, the department says, but are asked to consider “the technology’s privacy implications, impact on civil rights, effectiveness, and parental input”.