Privacy

The Guardian reports Apple has a secret appeal hearing tomorrow against the UK government’s demand for a backdoor to encrypted iCloud backups. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal lists a private hearing in its schedule.

In 2006 the AT&T whistleblower exposed a secret room inside the company that routed network traffic to the NSA, leaking documents that showed how the agency’s mass surveillance was carried out.

The new State Department program, called “Catch and Revoke,” will use AI to review the social media accounts of tens of thousands of students who are in the US on visas, Axios reports. State Department sources tell Axios that officials plan on combing through internal databases to see if any international students were arrested in pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 2023 — and that the department is working with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure a “whole of government and whole of authority approach.”

“The investigation will focus on the platform’s compliance with federal privacy law with respect to its collection, use, and disclosure of Canadians’ personal information to train artificial intelligence models,” according to a statement from The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada published by Reuters.

Brazil’s ANPD found on Friday that Altman’s biometric data-collecting project may interfere with Brazilians’ ability to freely consent to having their biometric data processed by offering crypto in exchange for the scans, according to a Reuters report syndicated at The Economic Times.

Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard was a longtime critic of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act... until it got in the way of her potential Senate confirmation.

404 Media has a good story about the reported hack of Gravy Analytics, and let’s just say the situation doesn’t seem great:

The European Commission must pay a German citizen EU 400 (about $412 USD) for improperly safeguarding the person’s data sent to Meta in the US after they used a “Sign in with Facebook” button to log into an EU site, reports Reuters.

The Intercept asked over 30 firms whether they’d use their data to help the Trump administration deport immigrants, but it only got four responses — and none of them were from Meta, Google, Microsoft, or Apple.