Category: Surveillance & Privacy

A British court has confirmed that Apple is suing the British government over a legal order regarding the company’s encryption of iCloud accounts, lifting a veil of official secrecy regarding the controversial move. In a judgment on Monday, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal — the only court in the country that can hear certain national security cases — said it would confirm “the bare details of the case” despite the British government’s argument that to do so would undermine national security….

More than 1 million students at New York University had their personal information exposed by a hacker who took over the school’s website over the weekend. On Saturday, the hacker replaced the NYU homepage with charts and links to large student datasets categorizing standardized testing scores based on race. The hacker claimed personal information identifying students was redacted but linked to four different datasets that included personal information on NYU applicants, their citizenship status and more. Cybersecurity expert Zack Ganot,…

The Coast Guard is in the midst of investigating a data breach within its personnel and payroll system that delayed bi-weekly pay for 1,135 service members. The Coast Guard said it temporarily shut down its Direct Access (DA) system as it investigates the breach. News articles won’t speculate, but supposedly enlisted users on certain online forums have said that hackers entered the DA system and changed the direct deposit data of the affected users. Coast Guard members take to social…

DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup, has temporarily paused downloads of its chatbot apps in South Korea while it works with local authorities to address privacy concerns, South Korean officials said Monday. South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission said DeepSeek’s apps were removed from the local versions of Apple’s App Store and Google Play on Saturday evening and that the company agreed to work with the agency to strengthen privacy protections before relaunching the apps. The action does not affect…

Amazon.com was sued on Wednesday by consumers who accused the retailing giant of secretly tracking their movements through their cellphones, and selling data it collects. According to a proposed class action in San Francisco federal court, Amazon obtained “backdoor access” to consumers’ phones by providing tens of thousands of app developers with code known as Amazon Ads SDK to be embedded in their apps. This allegedly enabled Amazon to collect an enormous amount of timestamped geolocation data about where consumers…

The Washington Post says it has seen documents according to which Google employees actively assisted Israel in gaining access to certain advanced AI technology quickly after the war in Gaza began. The report says Israel’s Defense Ministry sought to expand its use of Vertex AI, a Google service applying AI algorithms to data. One worker warned internally that a delay in granting access to the tech could push Israel to switch to competitor Amazon. The paper notes that while the documents confirm…

Google Cloud said on Wednesday it had partnered with Air France-KLM to deploy generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology on the airline group’s data. Google Cloud said in a statement that the Franco-Dutch airline group’s 551 operating aircraft, 93 million passengers carried in 2023, and its commercial and cargo flights generated large amounts of data, which would be used by Google Cloud’s AI solution in areas such as analyzing passenger preferences and travel patterns, and predicting maintenance of aircraft. Air France-KLM…

MILAN – Italian police have placed four people under house arrest as part of a probe into alleged illegal access to state databases by a private intelligence business run by a former policeman, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. The person told Reuters that Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, son of late billionaire Leonardo Del Vecchio, who founded Ray Ban-owner Luxottica, is among those targeted by the probe. Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, whom Reuters could not immediately…

LONDON (AP) — European Union regulators slapped LinkedIn on Thursday with a 310 million euro ($335 million) fine for violations of the bloc’s stringent data privacy rules. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission reprimanded the Microsoft-owned professional social networking site over concerns about the “lawfulness, fairness and transparency” of its personal data processing for advertising purposes. The Dublin-based watchdog is LinkedIn’s lead privacy regulator in the 27-nation EU because that’s where the company’s European headquarters is based. The watchdog said it carried…

The Dutch data protection watchdog on Tuesday issued facial recognition startup Clearview AI with a fine of 30.5 million euros ($45.6 million Cdn) over its creation of what the agency called an “illegal database” of billions of photos of faces. The Netherlands’ Data Protection Agency, or DPA, also warned Dutch companies that using Clearview’s services is also banned. The data agency said that New York-based Clearview “has not objected to this decision and is therefore unable to appeal against the…

The following article is from a Russian news source, Tass, which is controlled by the Russian Government. NEW YORK, August 26. /TASS/. French authorities have ‘crossed a red line’ after they decided to detain Telegram messenger founder Pavel Durov, Chris Pavlovski, the CEO of Rumble online video platform, said on Monday. “France has threatened Rumble, and now they have crossed a red line by arresting Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, reportedly for not censoring speech,” Pavlovski wrote on his X social…

BERLIN (AP) — A man who works for a German lawmaker in the European Parliament has been arrested on suspicion of spying for China, German prosecutors said Tuesday. The suspect, identified only as Jian G. in line with German privacy rules, was arrested Monday in Dresden, federal prosecutors said in a statement. They said that he has worked for a German lawmaker in the European Union’s legislature since 2019. The statement didn’t specify which lawmaker employed him, but German public…

Under a repressive new act, British nationals could face prison for undermining London’s national security line. Intended to destroy WikiLeaks and others exposing war crimes, the law is a direct threat to critical national security journalism. It was the afternoon of May 17 2023 and I had just arrived at London’s Luton Airport. I was on my way to the city of birth to visit my family. Before landing, the pilot instructed all passengers to have their passports ready for…

A former CIA software engineer was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday after his convictions for what the government described as the biggest theft of classified information in CIA history and for possession of child sexual abuse images and videos. The bulk of the sentence imposed on Joshua Schulte, 35, in Manhattan federal court came for an embarrassing public release of a trove of CIA secrets by WikiLeaks in 2017. He has been jailed since 2018. “We will…

  In 2023, the Department of Defense announced an ambitious plan to launch 1,000 satellites over the next decade. Over the same period, the National Reconnaissance Office, which runs the country’s spy satellites, plans to quadruple the size of its fleet of a couple dozen satellites.   The U.S. government can expand its fleet this quickly because satellites have become much cheaper to manufacture and easier to launch into space. Many of these new satellites are intended for surveillance, and…