Interesting

Category: Privacy (Page 2 of 3)

Australia passes social media minimum age law

Associated Press »

The law will make platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X, and Instagram liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for systemic failures to prevent children younger than 16 from holding accounts.

The Senate passed the bill on Thursday 34 votes to 19. The House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved the legislation by 102 votes to 13.

The House on Friday endorsed opposition amendments made in the Senate, making the bill law.

Earlier » Australia a step closer to being the world’s first country to ban social media for people under 16 years old

Elsewhere » Reuters / CBC

Quebec is paying close attention » Globe and Mail

Predictable » Big tech says Australia “rushed” social media ban for youths under 16

Air Canada to start using facial recognition technology at Vancouver International Airport (YVR)

Another blow to privacy.

Christopher Reynolds, writing for The Canadian Press »

Starting Tuesday, customers who board most domestic Air Canada flights at Vancouver International Airport will be able to walk onto the plane without presenting any physical pieces of identification, such as a passport or driver’s licence, the country’s largest airline said.

Participants in the program, which is voluntary, can upload a photo of their face and a scan of their passport to the airline’s app.

Launched as a pilot project in February 2023, the digital ID option is already available at Air Canada’s Maple Leaf lounges in Toronto, Calgary and San Francisco. The airline plans to unveil it at other Canadian airport gates “in the near future.”

More » Press Release / Air Canada

Military dating site leaves database with 1M records exposed

Cybersecurity Researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered an online non-password-protected database that contained more than 1.1 million records for a service that offers dating services, and social networking for military members and their supporters.

Jeremiah Fowler, writing in vpnMentor »

The publicly exposed database was not password-protected or encrypted. It contained a total of 1,187,296 documents. In a limited sampling, a majority of the documents I saw were user images, while others were photos of potentially sensitive proof of service documents. These contained full names (first, last, and middle), mailing addresses, SSN (US), National Insurance Numbers, and Service Numbers (UK). These documents also listed rank, branch of the service, dates, locations, and other information that should not be publicly accessible.

Upon further research, I identified that the records belonged to Forces Penpals, a dating service and social networking community for military service members and their supporters. I immediately sent a responsible disclosure notice, and public access was restricted the following day. It is not known how long the database was exposed or if anyone else gained access to it. Only an internal forensic audit could identify additional access or potentially suspicious activity.

Elsewhere » Bitdefende | Biometric Update

How to survive the post-truth world of Donald Trump

Carole Cadwalladr, of The Guardian has 20 suggestions on how to survive in the broligarchy. The article is worth reading. Here are a few of her suggestions »

1 When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.

2 Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.

8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.

9 Throw up the Kool-Aid. You drank it. That’s OK. We all did. But now is the time to stick your fingers down your throat and get that sick tech bro poison out of your system. Phones were – still are – a magic portal into a psychedelic fun house of possibility. They’re also tracking and surveilling you even as you sleep while a Silicon Valley edgelord plots ways to tear up the federal government.

Read the whole article »

FBI and CISA warn China is targeting the telecommunications Infrastructure

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a statement that reads »

Specifically, we have identified that People Republic of China (PRC)-affiliated actors have compromised networks at multiple telecommunications companies to enable the theft of customer call records data, the compromise of private communications of a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity, and the copying of certain information that was subject to U.S. law enforcement requests pursuant to court orders. We expect our understanding of these compromises to grow as the investigation continues.

Security plus Privacy » If you’re not paying, you are likely the product.

In this video, IBM’s Jeff Crume explains the impact on user privacy and data security, and how organizations manage these concerns. He covers the importance of informed consent, transparency, and regulatory compliance in safeguarding personal information – and the critical distinctions, and relationship, between security and privacy in digital services.


Note: Clicking the above image will load and play the video from YouTube.

France set to allow police to spy through phones

Le Monde »

French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. Part of a wider justice reform bill, the spying provision has been attacked by both the left and rights defenders as an authoritarian snoopers’ charter, though Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti insists it would affect only “dozens of cases a year.”

Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones, the measure would allow the geolocation of suspects in crimes punishable by at least five years’ jail. Devices could also be remotely activated to record sound and images of people suspected of terror offenses, as well as delinquency and organized crime.

The provisions “raise serious concerns over infringements of fundamental liberties,” digital rights group La Quadrature du Net wrote in a May statement. It cited the “right to security, right to a private life and to private correspondence” and “the right to come and go freely”, calling the proposal part of a “slide into heavy-handed security”.

 

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