Category: Surveillance & Privacy

Most of us just want to live our lives in peace without excessive governmental interference, but unfortunately the control freaks that are running things just can’t help themselves.  Ultimately, they aren’t going to be happy until they are able to watch, track, monitor and control virtually everything that we write, say and do.  This is one of the big reasons why they are gearing up to introduce “central bank digital currencies” all over the western world.  Such digital currencies will…

The State of Louisiana has experienced an extensive data breach, with six million public records being exposed. The breach was a part of a global attack on the third-party file transfer application, MOVEit. The breach is likely to raise further concerns as the state recently introduced a new law that is increasing the uptake of digital ID – a law that forces adult websites to check the age of all users, with many wanting it rolled out to all social media platforms. The personal details of every…

  The European Commission has signalled it could be preparing to break up Google’s adtech business. Speaking during a press conference this afternoon, EU EVP Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s competition chief and head of digital strategy, announced it has sent a formal statement of objections to Google for suspected anti-competitive conduct in its adtech business. If the Commission confirms its suspicions she said it is looking at breaking up Google’s adtech as the only viable solution to resolve what she…

Meta has been dragged kicking and screaming into another notable privacy concession in Europe: The German Federal Cartel Office (FCO) has announced a new account center incoming which will see the tech giant provide users of its social networking services with a greater degree of choice over whether they allow it to combine data on their activity across its services or not. It will be the first time Meta has provided such a degree of choice over its cross-site tracking…

We’ve written a lot about AB 2273, California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) that requires websites with users in California to try to determine the ages of all their visitors, write up dozens of reports on potential harms, and then seek to mitigate those harms. I’ve written about why it’s literally impossible to comply with the law. We’ve had posts on how it conflicts with privacy laws and how it’s a radical experimentation on children (ironically, the drafters of the…

CorruptionLedger commentary in red.   Twitter has pulled out of the European Union’s voluntary code to fight disinformation, the EU has said. Thierry Breton, who is the EU’s internal market commissioner, announced the news on Twitter – but warned the firm new laws would force compliance. “Obligations remain. You can run but you can’t hide,” he said. Twitter will be legally required to fight disinformation in the EU from 25 August, he said, adding: “Our teams will be ready for…

When then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called for heads to roll after the 2016 census was pulled offline – amid fears IBM’s data servers hosting the survey had been infiltrated – the American enterprise technology giant made an important decision. IBM ran most of the big mainframe systems that had powered core government functions for several decades, earning it billions of dollars a year in fees and making the Australian government one of its top global clients. No census data was…

(Washington, DC) – President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and legislators from his party have effectively paralyzed the country’s independent transparency and data protection agency by blocking nominations to fill vacant seats on its board, Human Rights Watch said today. The Senate should move swiftly to fill the three vacant seats. The National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information, and Data Protection (INAI) is the independent agency charged with enforcing transparency and data protection rules in Mexico. It has played an…

Most of us wouldn’t argue that private companies can’t run their businesses the way they prefer. The gold standard has been the right to refuse service to anyone — something that covers everything from refusing paper checks from certain customers to booting people off social media services for refusing to stop behaving like inveterate assholes. When private companies do things, they rarely mess with constitutional protections. There are guardrails in place to prevent discrimination against minorities and other historically oppressed…

LONDON – Meta on Monday was fined a record 1.2 billion euros (S$1.75 billion) and ordered to stop transferring data collected from Facebook users in Europe to the United States, in a major ruling against the social media giant for violating European Union (EU) data protection rules. The penalty, which eclipses a 746 million euro EU fine previously doled out to Amazon.com, was announced by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission. It is potentially one of the most consequential in the five…

Adam Kovacevich is the CEO and founder of a center-left tech industry coalition called Chamber of Progress and has worked at the intersection of tech and politics for 20 years, leading public policy at Google and Lime and serving as a Democratic Hill aide. When the Biden administration proposed new protections earlier this month to prevent law enforcement from demanding reproductive healthcare data from companies, they took a critical first step in protecting our personal data. But there remains a…

  Corruption Ledger editorial note: Privacy technology and strategies have the ability to help all oppressed people, whether male, female, underprivileged or targeted by corrupt corporate or government establishments. Here’s one case in point. TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Inside a little wooden house among the pine and oak forests of western Honduras’ coffee-growing mountains, a woman opened a tiny package of pills, delivered to a nearby town. She didn’t know it, but the medication had more than likely entered the…

  It turns out that if you fire basically all of the competent trust & safety people at your website, you end up with a site that is neither trustworthy, nor safe. We’ve spent months covering ways in which you cannot trust anything from Twitter or Elon Musk, and there have been some indications of real safety problems on the site, but it’s been getting worse lately, with two somewhat terrifying stories that show just how unsafe the site has…

Apple’s App Store team prevented more than $2 billion in transactions tagged as potentially fraudulent and blocked almost 1.7 million app submissions for privacy, security, and content policy violations in 2022. As part of its ongoing efforts to fend off account fraud, the company also terminated 428,000 developer accounts for potentially fraudulent activity, deactivated 282 million fraudulent customer accounts, and blocked 105 million developer account creations for suspected fraudulent activities. The App Store team also protected Apple users from hundreds of…

  One of the largest pharmacy service providers in the United States has confirmed that hackers accessed the personal data of almost six million patients. PharMerica operates over 2,500 facilities across the U.S. and offers more than 3,100 pharmacy and healthcare programs. In a data breach notification filed with Maine’s attorney general, PharMerica said it learned of suspicious activity on its computer network on March 14. An internal investigation revealed that an “unknown third party” accessed its systems days earlier…

PARIS – The traces of genetic material that humans constantly shed wherever they go could soon be used to track individual people, or even whole ethnic groups, scientists said on Monday, warning of a looming “ethical quagmire”.

A recently developed technique can glean a huge amount of information from tiny samples of genetic material called environmental DNA, or eDNA, that humans and animals leave behind everywhere – including in the air.

The tool could lead to a range of medical and scientific advances, and could even help track down criminals, according to the authors of a new study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

But it also poses a vast range of concerns around consent, privacy and surveillance, they added.