Yahoo has agreed to pay $50 million in damages and provide two years of free credit-monitoring services to 200 million people whose email addresses and other personal information were stolen as part of the biggest security breach in history. The restitution hinges on federal court approval of a settlement filed late Monday in a 2-year-old lawsuit seeking to hold Yahoo accountable for digital burglaries...
Apple has updated its rules to restrict app developers’ ability to harvest data from mobile phones, which could be bad news for a Facebook-owned data security app called Onavo Protect. Onavo ostensibly provides users with a free virtual private network (VPN) which, it claims, helps “keep you and your data safe when you browse and share information on the web”. What is not immediately...
The Tor Project announced that it’s working with Mozilla to integrate Tor into Firefox. Eventually, this should completely eliminate the need for the Tor Browser, as most of its features would be merged into Firefox’s new “super-private mode.” Tor Browser Development Largely Redundant The Tor Browser is based on the Extended Support Release (ESR) version of Firefox, because it’s a more stable development cycle...
Google is slowly pulling back the curtains on its next-gen Android P release. Yesterday, we got our first glimpse at a work-in-progress, developer-focused preview of the software — and today, we’re getting a closer look at what exactly is new when it comes to Android P and the ever-evolving subject of Android security. Here’s the inside scoop on what you can expect: More controlled...
Facebook is reportedly testing out a pilot program to counter revenge porn that involves users sending the company nude photos of themselves that may be in others’ possession. The program, which is currently only being deployed in Australia, creates a digital thumbprint of the potential revenge porn images, known as “hashing,” that users don’t want spread without their consent on Facebook. Once a photo...
Windows 10 has brought a number of new features and capabilities to PCs, such as a user interface that can work with both desktops and touch-centric 2-in-1 devices. While Microsoft backed off from its original plans of having a billion Windows 10 users by 2018, the company has still managed to upgrade an impressive 400 million users to its newest and most strategic operating...
Add-on companies are selling the browsing history of millions of users to third-parties according to a report that aired on German national TV. Reporters of Panorama managed to gain access to a large data collection that contained the browsing history of roughly 3 million German Internet users. The data was collected by companies that produce browser extensions for various popular browsers such as Chrome...
A ruling to protect German WhatsApp users’ data from Facebook suggests that the EU bloc will not back down on protecting consumers’ data privacy, despite an earlier win by Facebook in a Belgian appeal case. This summer, the Brussels Court of Appeals decided to reverse an earlier ruling restricting Facebook from tracking non-Facebook users in Belgium through the use of cookies. The new ruling...
Facebook has been ordered to stop collecting and storing data on WhatsApp users in Germany, marking the first regulatory challenge to a controversial data-sharing scheme that the social media company announced in August. In a statement published Tuesday, Germany’s privacy watchdog said that sharing WhatsApp user data with Facebook, the messaging app’s parent company, constitutes “an infringement of national data protection law.” The regulatory body also...
When WhatsApp, the messaging app, launched in 2009, it struck me as one of the most interesting innovations I’d seen in ages – for two reasons. The first was that it seemed beautifully designed from the outset: it was clean, minimalist and efficient; and, secondly, it had a business model that did not depend on advertising. Instead, users got a year free, after which...
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