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Arvind Narayanan and Edward W. Felten. July 9, 2014 “Paul Ohm’s 2009 article Broken Promises of Privacy spurred a debate in legal and policy circles on the appropriate response to computer science research on re-identification techniques. In this debate, the empirical research has often been misunderstood or misrepresented. A new report by Ann Cavoukian and Daniel Castro is full of such inaccuracies, …
Martin Brinkmann – ghacks.net: “Most online companies make available privacy related settings that their customers can modify to their liking. The default settings are often less than optimal and making sure that everything is set up properly is one of the first things that you should do. In fact, it is also important to check those settings regularly …
Jeff Goldman – eSecurity PlanetJeff Goldman – “A recent survey of 599 security executives at utility, oil and gas, energy and manufacturing companies in 13 countries has found that 67 percent have experienced at least one security breach in the past 12 months that led to the loss of confidential information or the disruption of operations. The survey, conducted …
“EAST [European ATM Security Team] has just published its second European Fraud Update for 2014. This is based on country crime updates given by representatives of 19 countries in the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), and 3 non-SEPA countries, at the 33rd EAST meeting held at the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) at Europol in The …
EFF – “Wikipedia readers and editors can now enjoy a higher level of long-term privacy, thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation’s rollout last week of forward secrecy on its encrypted connections. Forward secrecy is an important Web privacy protection; we’ve been tracking its implementation across many popular sites with our Encrypt the Web Report. And though it may sound …
“In the first half of 2014, Verizon received approximately 150,000 requests for customer information from federal, state or local law enforcement in the United States. We do not release customer information unless authorized by law, such as a valid law enforcement demand or an appropriate request in an emergency involving the danger of death or serious …
In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are, by Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani “Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of 10 account holders found …
Follow up to previous posting – Facebook tinkered with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment – Study, via WSJ.com – Facebook Experiments Had Few Limits, Data Science Lab Conducted Tests on Users With Little Oversight: Reed Albergotti – “Since its creation in 2007, Facebook’s Data Science group has run hundreds of tests. One published study deconstructed how …
“Do you own an Android device? Is it less than three years old? If so, then when your phone’s screen is off and it’s not connected to a Wi-Fi network, there’s a high risk that it is broadcasting your location history to anyone within Wi-Fi range that wants to listen. This location history comes in the …
“EPIC has filed a formal complaint to the Federal Trade Commission concerning Facebook’s manipulation of users’ News Feeds for psychological research. “The company purposefully messed with people’s minds,” states the EPIC complaint. EPIC has charged that the study violates a privacy consent order and is a deceptive trade practice. In 2012, Facebook subjected 700,000 users to an “emotional” …
Marthews, Alex and Tucker, Catherine, Government Surveillance and Internet Search Behavior (March 24, 2014). Available or download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2412564 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2412564 “This paper uses data from Google Trends on search terms from before and after the surveillance revelations of June 2013 to analyze whether Google users’ search behavior shifted as a result of an exogenous shock in …
NSA targets the privacy-conscious – von J. Appelbaum, A. Gibson, J. Goetz, V. Kabisch, L. Kampf, L. Ryge. “The investigation discloses the following: Two servers in Germany – in Berlin and Nuremberg – are under surveillance by the NSA. Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to …
