As gadgets and services get smarter, they need more data, and face the hard problem of keeping it safe. Data privacy has become a huge problem for Google, Facebook, Amazon, and any company using artificial intelligence to power its services — and a major sticking point for lawmakers looking to regulate. Here’s all the news on data privacy and how it’s changing tech.
A security researcher says they found the file on a regional airline’s unsecured server. According to The Daily Dot, the airline has confirmed that “NoFly.csv” was indeed genuine, and from 2019.
The address to Billie Eilish’s family home was reportedly sent to 178,000 users of Citizen, an app that purports to crowdsource live crime information (to very mixed results). According to Vice, the house isn’t exactly a top-secret location, and the exact address has since been removed. Still, I can’t imagine someone with a hit song about the lack of privacy that comes with fame wants their address blasted out.
You may remember New York Times writer Kashmir Hill from episodes including hacking a stranger’s smart home via Google, lifting the veil on Facebook’s shadow profiles tracking people who don’t have Facebook accounts, and making an exhaustive attempt to live online without the big five tech companies.
Now she has announced a release date for her book on Clearview AI, the facial recognition firm she once called “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It.”
Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower that has been long-feared by the civil liberties community and long-desired by governments and authoritarian regimes. And it is a powerful warning that in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, this kind of technology will fundamentally change our ability to be anonymous.
The search giant’s required to pay $9.5 million to DC and $20 million to Indiana after the states sued the company for allegedly tracking users’ locations without their consent. This $29.5 million sum adds to the $392 million Google agreed to pay to 40 states over similar allegations last month.
The Markup team brought us this thoroughly-reported story on tax preparers using the Meta Pixel to quietly send users’ sensitive financial information to Facebook, which we’ve co-published this morning. If you prepare your taxes online, you’ll want to take a look.
The Markup found services including TaxAct, TaxSlayer, and H&R Block sending sensitive data.
