Privacy

All stories in Privacy

• Bought a used Nest security cam? The previous owner can spy on you (Update: Fixed)

  A new report by Wirecutter finds some users who sold their Nest cam devices are able to access images from their old cameras ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Google open-sources cryptographic tool to keep data sets private

  Google open-sources Private Join and Compute, a new secure multi-party computation (MPC) tool designed to help organizations ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• India is still hounding WhatsApp to make its messages traceable

  Indian aks WhatApp to "digitally fingerprint" every message sent on its platform without breaking encryption, according to ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Tim Cook takes aim at tech companies for creating 'chaos'

  Apple CEO Tim Cook once again took shots at Silicon Valley tech companies in his Stanford commencement speech on Sunday.

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• PSA: Set your Venmo transactions to private right now

  A new research has found that Venmo continues to make it easy for third-parties to scrap users' public transaction history ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Apple's privacy-focused features risk trapping users in its walled garden

  An update to the App Store Review Guidelines reveals that apps that use other companies' single sign-on features will be ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Loyalty programs cost you your personal data — are the rewards worth it?

  Rewards and loyalty programs are increasingly becoming a way to access your personal information. These apps make it easy ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Addressing the privacy paradox: Top leaders and experts share insights

  During TNW Conference 2019, top government officials, business and technology leaders came together at The Assembly to discuss ...

  • Andrea Hak

• Why Gary Vaynerchuk thinks the death of privacy is a good thing

  Gary Vaynerchuk wades into the privacy debate and explains why he thinks that most people care about privacy in theory. But ...

  • Neil C. Hughes

• Privacy is Apple’s most premium product

  However, Apple was selling another feature to all of us – privacy. Apple took jibes at Google and Facebook and tracking ...

  • Ivan Mehta

• Apple introduces privacy-focused 'Sign in with Apple' button for sites and apps

  Apple introduces privacy-focused 'Sign in with Apple' button for sites and apps to keep the app trackers away from tracking ...

  • Ivan Mehta

• Google is cracking down on Drive and Chrome extensions that abuse your data

  Google has announced new policies for Chrome extensions and Drive API that ensures developers only have necessary permissions ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Amazon adds vocal command to delete saved Alexa recordings

  Amazon recently announced an easy solution for privacy-conscious individuals to delete the devices’ saved recordings. Now, ...

  • Bryan Clark

• Google and Facebook are gonna hate Apple's new privacy-preserving online ads

  Apple has outlined a new Safari feature, called Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution, that aims to stop online ads from ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• PSA: You can now delete your voice recordings with an Alexa command

  Amazon is now rolling out a pair of Alexa voice commands that allows you to delete voice recordings without using its website. ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Your iPhone is leaking personal info to tracking companies

  The Washington Post finds a lot of third-party iOS apps are sending sensitive personal information to tracking companies. ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Apple's privacy reputation at risk with new iTunes class-action lawsuit

  Three iTunes file a federal lawsuit against Apple alleging that the company unlawfully collects and sells their iTunes listening ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Why the future of US data regulation must come from Congress

  As of May 2019, over 20 US states have introduced bills seeking to regulate data privacy, data security, or some combination ...

  • Alison Pepper

• Kenya is allegedly selling citizen data to highest corporate bidder

  According to Dr. Roselyn K. Akombe, Chief of Policy Planning and Guidance at the United Nations and ex-commissioner of Kenya's ...

  • iAfrikan News

• Listen, parents, here are 3 reasons you shouldn't use child tracking apps

  The use of self-tracking and personal surveillance technologies has grown considerably over the last decade. There are now ...

  • The Conversation

• South African voters fear mobile political campaigns will steal their personal info

  Mobile technology will arguably go down in history as the most successful innovation of our lifetime. Mobile devices, especially ...

  • The Conversation

• Twitter bug accidentally shared location data of some iOS users

  Twitter says it has fixed a security bug that resulted in a user's approximate location information being shared with an ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Google forces Nest users to use Google accounts, raising privacy concerns

  Google's Nest rebranding gets rid of the privacy barrier between Google and Nest, and the move has significant implications ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Google's case for privacy is more convincing than Facebook's

  A week after Facebook's F8 conference, Google makes a case for privacy, stating how a lot of new features have been built ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Facebook contract workers look at your private posts to help train its AI

  A new report from Reuters has revealed how contract workers for Facebook and Instagram are looking at your private posts ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Here's what Facebook announced at its F8 developer keynote

  Facebook announces a redesign of its social network alongside updates to Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp at F8 deve conference. ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• PSA: You can now auto-delete your location and web history on Google

  Google has announced it is rolling out new auto-delete controls for Location History and Web & App Activity that allows users ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Here are the 7 requirements for building ethical AI, according to the EU commission

  In October, Amazon had to discontinue an artificial intelligence–powered recruiting tool after it discovered the system ...

  • Ben Dickson

• How Facebook plans to keep your data private while opening it up to researchers

  Facebook has outlined a differential privacy-based approach that it expects will protect users' confidentiality while simultaneously ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Facebook clamps down on personality quizzes to plug data leaks

  Facebook has updated its devloper platform policies to subject apps with minimal utility, such as personality quizzes, to ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Facebook sets aside billions to pay its way through privacy issues

  Facebook said it has set aside $3 billion in connection with an ongoing FTC investigation into its privacy abuses set off ...

  • Ravie Lakshmanan

• Facebook uploaded 1.5 million people’s email contacts without permission

  Welcome to the newest episode of "Facebook screws up daily." it uploaded contact lists of over 1.5 million people since 2016, ...

  • Ivan Mehta

• Jumbo is an iPhone app that clears your old tweets and Google searches

  There’s an insane amount of news every day about social networks screwing up and compromising user data. So, it’s advisable ...

  • Ivan Mehta

• Big tech’s ‘ethical guidelines’ are no substitute for real regulation

  Data ethics is now a cause célèbre. “Digital ethics and privacy” shot into research and advisory company Gartner’s ...

  • The Conversation

• Smart cities are an AI-powered dystopia that's already happening

  Separating the futuristic from the dystopian in the minds of the general public can be a challenge, particularly when trying ...

  • Binary District Journal

• How to stop people from adding you to WhatsApp groups

  WhatsApp announced a feature that allows people to stop others from adding them to group without consent. Now, the feature ...

  • Ivan Mehta

• Activision knows when its employees are having sex

  The Washington Post this week reported Activision Blizzard has been using various apps to track its employees' health ...

  • Rachel Kaser

• WhatsApp finally lets you prevent people from adding you to their shitty groups

  WhatsApp is finally rolling out a feature that will prevent anyone from adding you to a group without your permission from ...

  • Ivan Mehta

• Rebuilding trust in democracy starts with digital identity verification

  As Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote, “free and fair elections are the heart of every democracy.” Despite controversy over ...

  • Vinny Lingham

• Facebook announces a long-overdue transparency tool for News Feed

  Over the weekend, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sounded the alarm, calling for increased government regulation for internet ...

  • Bryan Clark

• The rise of the ubiquitous voice assistant

  Apple, Amazon, and Google have done a great job educating users that voice is here! Voice recognition has been getting better ...

  • Rajat Mukherjee

• No, viewing publicly shared Google Docs don't reveal your identity

  Every day, millions of people use Google Docs to share and collaborate on documents. And when it comes to working on documents ...

  • Ben Dickson

• PSA: MetaMask reveals your Ethereum address to sites you visit, here’s how to hide it

  There's a setting disabled by popular Ethereum service MetaMask by default, and its putting the privacy of cryptocurrency ...

  • David Canellis

• Think about privacy the next time you ask Alexa the weather

  As long as voice assistants are on the rise, data privacy should be too. The market is now saturated with voice assistants ...

  • Eric Johnson

• Rift widens between Epic and gamers over data mining allegations

  Epic Games is being torn a new one by gamers again. This time, it's been accused of mining users' Steam data without their ...

  • Rachel Kaser

• Mark Zuckerberg plans to make Facebook more private with 6 key changes

  Mark Zuckerberg wants to make Facebook less like a town square, and more like a living room. So he declares in a massive ...

  • Napier Lopez

• We’re not safe without information privacy

  It’s not just because you are a criminal and the coppers might catch you. Or because you really, really hate big corporations ...

  • Larry Sanger

• PSA: Don’t give out your phone number for Facebook 2FA, use an app instead

  It's no secret that Facebook doesn't respect your privacy in the least: we learned last October that the company  used the ...

  • Abhimanyu Ghoshal

• Ad blockers threaten digital marketers’ ability to understand customers

  Digital advertisers know they’re screwed. Digital marketers don’t. Considering statistics like one in four US internet ...

  • Hamlet Batista

• Facebook "owns" my family: a cautionary fable

  I hate New Year. I don’t do resolutions and am generally “bah, humbug” about the whole hullabaloo. This year, my ...

  • Jennifer Baker

• Facebook sucks for privacy, but how good are advertisers at targeting me?

  Amid the massive hue and cry about Facebook’s utter disregard for data privacy, and the illicit use of personally identifiable ...

  • Preetish Panda

• Why data privacy is hot and machine learning is not

  Looking back on the past twelve months, we will all remember cybersecurity scares, revelations of data malpractices, and ...

  • Rafael Laguna

• Facial recognition tech sucks, but it’s inevitable

  Is facial recognition accurate? Can it be hacked? These are just some of the questions being raised by lawmakers, civil libertarians, ...

  • Christopher Shiostu

• Depressing lessons 2018's endless data breaches taught us

  In the days after Facebook's September announcement about a bug that may have compromised 90 million users – yes, that ...

  • Emily Wilson

• How to decentralize social media, according to Wikipedia’s co-founder

  The problem about social media is that it is centralized. Centralization empowers massive corporations and governments ...

  • Larry Sanger

• Laws can't keep up with sex robots' ethical and privacy issues

  From the Drudge Report to The New York Times, sex robots are rapidly becoming a part of the national conversation about the ...

  • The Conversation

• 15 strategies everyone should know to protect their online information

  As technology increases at an ever-faster rate, so too do the ways in which our information can be put at risk. With the ...

  • Scott Gerber

• Apple's crackdown on screen-recording apps is a privacy win

  Apple’s iOS screen recording functionality – which was first introduced in version 11 back in 2017 – comes in handy ...

  • Ivan Mehta

• Why Germany wants to block Facebook's Messenger-Instagram-WhatsApp merger

  Facebook made a splash recently when CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans to integrate its messaging platforms on Instagram, Messenger, ...

  • Vishwam Sankaran

• Facebook's totally not listening to you, its new ad disclosure feature screams desperately

  Remember hearing about - or worse, feeling like - people seeing ads related to topics they've merely talked about with friends ...

  • Ivan Mehta

• Google has quietly dropped ban on personally identifiable web tracking

  This article was originally published by ProPublica on October 21st, 2016. When Google bought the advertising network ...

  • Julia Angwin, Pro Publica

• This week's Facebook-Google-Apple drama, explained

  With so much happening in the tech world, this week feels like it’s 21 days long. The highlight of the week has been the ...

  • Ivan Mehta

• New macOS malware steals your cookies to swipe your cryptocurrency

  Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 have uncovered a new cryptocurrency stealing malware that specifically ...

  • Matthew Beedham

• After Facebook, Google apologizes for running a user data collection program on iOS

  Last night, just when we were trying to get our heads around Facebook's data collecting program, TechCrunch reported that ...

  • Ivan Mehta

• How to hide everything from everyone on your PlayStation 4

  Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, tricks, guides, and advice on how to get the most out of your gadgets, apps, ...

  • Rachel Kaser

• How 2018 became Facebook’s worst year in privacy and security

  In early December, Facebook’s developer team declared the discovery of a security bug that gave developers access to ...

  • Ben Dickson

• How to review and delete your Google search history

  Your Google search history includes the queries you've entered into Google search when you're signed in. Here's how to wipe ...

  • Abhimanyu Ghoshal

• US police can't force you to unlock your phone with fingerprints or face recognition

  A US federal court judge ruled that police can't compel suspects to unlock their phones using biometrics like face recognition, ...

  • Abhimanyu Ghoshal

• NASA looks to secure flight data with blockchain tech

  NASA is exploring potential use-cases for blockchain technology in a bid to safeguard the privacy and security of aircraft ...

  • Yessi Bello Perez

• Google twists Samourai Wallet's arm to disable privacy features

  Samourai Wallet, a bitcoin wallet provider, is temporarily disabling some of its privacy-related features following a request ...

  • Yessi Bello Perez

• Weather apps are secretly selling your location data to the highest bidder

  Location data is a funny thing. You need it to get an accurate forecast, and they, the app-maker, need it to cash in on a ...

  • Bryan Clark

• How blockchain technology can — and can't — prevent sexual assault

  This story explores how projects like Callisto and LegalFling are using blockchain technology to store vital information ...

  • Cara Curtis

• The free internet makes us the product — we need to stop it

  The bad headlines continue to stack up for Facebook this year: from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to the New York Times ...

  • Mark Rolston

• Google reportedly shuts down its Chinese censored search project

  Google has stopped key data analysis needed for its highly contested China project, the censored search engine 'Dragonfly' ...

  • Már Másson Maack

• Blockchains should have ‘privacy by design’ for GDPR compliance

  LTO Network hosted speakers at Hard Fork Decentralized last night to tackle some of the blockchain industry's toughest GDPR ...

  • Matthew Beedham

• This website sets your Spotify playlists to private with a single click

  Nobody will know you love Peter Andre

  • Matthew Hughes

• US government building tools to deanonymize anonymous cryptocurrencies

  If you thought you were safe using privacy coins like Zcash and Monero, think again, the US government is developing forensic ...

  • Matthew Beedham

• What GoDaddy is doing wrong about privacy — here’s what it should do

  GoDaddy asks users to pay for privacy protection. It's distasteful that a large domain registrar would charge a fee for a ...

  • Dan Storbaek

• 7 EU countries accuse Google of violating GDPR by tracking users

  Consumer groups in the Netherlands, Poland, Czechia, Greece, Slovenia, Sweden, and Norway have asked regulators to look into ...

  • Már Másson Maack

• Uber fined €1M for 2016 data breach by Dutch and British privacy watchdogs

  The Dutch Data Protection Authority and UK's Information Commissioner's Office have fined Uber over €1M the company's data ...

  • Már Másson Maack

• Here's how we take back control over our digital identities

  The data reckoning has arrived. We’re already too familiar with the breach headlines: Equifax, Under Armour, Target. But ...

  • Charles Race

• Microchip implants are threatening workers’ rights

  It’s not often trades unions and employers are equally worried about an issue threatening workers’ rights. But recently, ...

  • The Conversation

• Please appreciate Mozilla’s security-focused gift guide

  Shout out Mozilla. The not-for-profit company behind the web-browser Firefox has put together a gift guide with a difference. ...

  • Callum Booth

• Report: Microsoft’s enterprise products covertly gather personal data on users

  Microsoft collects and stores personal data about the behavior of individual users of its enterprise offerings on a large ...

  • Már Másson Maack

• We’re living in digital serfdom — trading privacy for convenience

  Think for a second: compared to your grandparents and parents, what do you actually own outright? Why own when you can ...

  • Hassan Khan

• China has a new surveillance tool that identifies citizens by how they walk

  Chinese authorities have begun deploying a new surveillance tool designed to identify people by how they walk, or the shapes ...

  • Bryan Clark

• Twitter's privacy settings, explained

  Twitter is one of the most open social media platforms on the web, which is why it might be easier to ignore the privacy ...

  • Rachel Kaser

• When your boss knows everything about you

  Big data and algorithmic decision making have become an indispensable part of the human resources toolkit at companies.

  • William Watterson

• Is Tim Cook the champion of privacy?

  Today’s ceaseless data scandals have everyone talking about privacy, especially insofar as our favorite digital devices ...

  • Gary Eastwood

• Tim Cook supports EU’s strict privacy laws — but thinks taxes are 'crap'

  Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, gave a keynote at ICDPPC where he called for better data policies in tech and lauded EU's GDPR. Unfortunately, ...

  • Már Másson Maack

• 50% of American WhatsApp users don't know it's owned by Facebook

  Research from the search engine DuckDuckGo has revealed 50 percent of American WhatsApp users don't realize Facebook owns ...

  • Callum Booth

• Here's how to keep advertisers from using your phone number on Facebook

  A Gizmodo report on Wednesday detailed the latest in a long series of Facebook privacy blunders. The report said, and Facebook ...

  • Bryan Clark

• Without coaching our privacy, does Google even have a business?

  Google is on a seemingly-ceaseless crusade to turn every one of its users into an open book that it can exploit for valuable ...

  • Gary Eastwood

• Google and Mastercard are secretly tracking your offline purchases

  Google has quietly been providing select advertisers a "stockpile" of offline credit card transaction data. After a four ...

  • Bryan Clark

• Facebook recently started asking banks for your financial data

  A report from the Wall Street Journal today revealed Facebook was attempting to gain detailed financial information from ...

  • Rachel Kaser

• All Android phones should run stock OS (including you Samsung!)

  Countless consumers around the globe cherish the customization options available to them when it comes to their smartphones, ...

  • Gary Eastwood

• GDPR is eroding our privacy, not protecting it

  It's been more than a couple of months since GDPR (the EU General Data Protection Regulation) came into force. The promise ...

  • Mindaugas Kiskis

• Facebook's Digital Literacy Library is an imperfect course in online etiquette

  Facebook today released a "Digital Literacy Library," a series of education modules designed to help parents and teachers ...

  • Rachel Kaser

• This is how you can personalize marketing campaigns — without violating GDPR

  GDPR -- no other four letters are giving tech companies a bigger headache this year. So many articles have been written about ...

  • Yvonne Koleczek

• How cryptography enables online shopping, cloud tech, and the blockchain

  What do the Gallic Wars and online shopping have in common? The answer, believe it or not, is cryptography. Cryptography ...

  • Nigel Smart

• Privacy Statement

  Privacy Statement This Privacy Statement applies to personal data collected, used and stored by The Next Web B.V. having ...

  • Julian Aijal

• WhatsApp's label for forwarded messages won't be enough to battle fake news

  Continuing its mission to help fight the spread of misinformation on its platform, WhatsApp is introducing a label to help ...

  • Abhimanyu Ghoshal