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.
The House was supposed to have a procedural vote on renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act today, ahead of the program’s April 20th expiration. Speaker Mike Johnson delayed the debate — again. There’s still a chance the House may vote later today, but it’s unlikely.
After failing to get details about a user who said “TSA sucks and we all know it,” via a traditional court order, DHS is now dragging Reddit in front of a grand jury. The government has grown increasingly aggressive in its attempts to deal with online critics. Reddit has not said whether it plans to fight the subpoena, but according to The Intercept:
“Privacy is central to how Reddit operates, and we take our commitment to protecting that seriously,” the company said in a statement to The Intercept. “We do not voluntarily share information with any government, especially not on users exercising their rights to criticize the government or plan a protest.”
As 404 Media reports, the FBI managed to extract Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone by accessing the phone’s notification database, where incoming messages were viewable even after the app was deleted. Signal users may want to turn on the app’s settings feature that hides message content in notifications.
A proposed class action lawsuit claims Perplexity “effectively planted a bug” on users’ computers by embedding trackers from Meta and Google inside its AI search engine, as reported earlier by Ars Technica. It also alleges that Perplexity’s incognito mode “does nothing” to protect user privacy:
Even paid users who turned on the “Incognito” feature still had their conversations shared with Meta and Google, along with their email addresses and other identifiers that allowed Meta and Google to personally identify them.
According to “I Decompiled the White House’s New App,” the Android version has some odd choices for a government app that mostly shows content from the White House website.
That includes enabling location tracking and other monitoring via OneSignal’s analytics (which the company says are opt-in at the OS level), JavaScript loaded from some guy’s GitHub, an injected script to hide things like consent dialogs on pages users open in the app, and other hooks to non-government third-party services.
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CBP agents at Miami International Airport briefly detained 20 activists, 18 of whom had their phones taken.
Bills like California’s Digital Age Assurance Act will require operating systems to confirm their users’ ages, but the developers of the privacy-focused Android fork said in a post on X on Friday that they’re not planning to age-gate their operating system:
“GrapheneOS will remain usable by anyone around the world without requiring personal information, identification or an account. GrapheneOS and our services will remain available internationally. If GrapheneOS devices can’t be sold in a region due to their regulations, so be it.”
Lawmakers don’t want VPNs to stand in the way of online age verification.
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick on the history of the NSA and mass surveillance in America, and why Anthropic’s fight with the Pentagon should worry us.
While end-to-end encryption can keep an account’s data private and hidden even from a service provider, the name of who paid for the account and other metadata is harder to hide.
Anyone else notice that ICE isn’t worried about getting doxed by Meta?
The security camera maker’s Search Party feature, advertised during the Super Bowl, has sparked a surveillance backlash.
Ring’s Super Bowl ad focused on how its cameras could be networked to find a missing dog, but for a lot of people, it highlighted the surveillance power hiding in those devices. Now Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has sent a letter to Amazon saying, “Get this creepy technology away from our homes.”
You can read it in full here, but here’s a snippet:
Yesterday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) publicly sent the director of the CIA an unclassified letter referring to a classified letter he had previously sent him, describing it as one “in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities.”
Wyden is known to do this — as a legislator with a security clearance and a seat on the Senate intelligence committee, he is very careful not to disclose classified information — but when he sees something wild, he send up a vague signal flare that something is wrong. Spencer Ackerman recounts one of the previous times this happened, back in 2011: “It would take Edward Snowden, two years later, to reveal what Wyden was talking about.”
The fine, a measly £247,590 (about $335,000), is because Imgur owner MediaLab wasn’t checking users ages, and so handled young kids’ data without proper consent measures. After the ICO warned a fine was coming last September, Imgur started blocking UK users entirely — a ban which is still in effect.
Key privacy settings and best practices.
When Intuit Dome opened last season, the arena staff assumed only a third of fans would opt-in to scanning, but close to 75 percent of venue attendees enrolled. The Clippers promise they are not using facial recognition — sorry, they call it “facial authentication” — for security purposes.
Early facial ticketing pilots were met with some protests. And energy still exists to create more state or federal oversight. But as the technology’s penetration has expanded, pushback seemingly hasn’t. A demand for security is leading venue operators to test out the newest tech, while a desire for convenience and personalization has seen fans increasingly getting in line.
