Apple's attempt to prevent fingerprinting through the required reason API seems to be useless. Facebook just updated their iOS app. The app still sends the uptime and disk space information off-device. It declares reasons that prevent the app from sending such data as per Apple documentation:
Venezia, contributo di accesso e Smart Control Room - Smart Controlled (episodio 1)
Si può tracciare un telefono con i dati di geolocalizzazione dello smartphone? Le "smart city" sono un rischio per la libertà e la #privacy delle persone? Il caso di Venezia: la Smart Control Room e il contributo di accesso dal 25 aprile 2024.
Il video di #SlowNews
I'm kind of annoyed by VPN ads everywhere. VPNs have some valid use cases, but many of the advertised claims are false.
You don't need a VPN to protect yourself against eavesdroppers on public WiFis. You already have HTTPS for that. This point did make sense ~10 years ago, when HTTPS was not that omnipresent and pushing users to fall back to plain HTTP was much easier, but nowadays...
That lock next to your address bar is much better than any VPN!
Protect your info online folks and don't expect much from AirBnB if you get a fraudulent charge from them on your card!
I recently saw an AirBnB purchase on my credit card. I did not make it. $CAD466 for a reservation in London. I have never even had my CC connected to AirBNB and my account is secure. It was obviously made by someone who got my CC info.
I saw it a couple days after the transaction but it was still pending on my statement. So I called my bank (VanCity) and they asked all the right questions, removed the "token" for AirBNB so other transactions couldn't be made, and encouraged me to contact ABNB, screenshot any communications, and try to get them to reverse the transaction.
I had three conversations with ABNB. The first, text chat, I explained the situation, they were receptive but it ended without any resolution.
After waiting a few hours for a response, I called ABNB for another conversation. This one ended with them agreeing, verbally, to refund the amount in 24-48hrs.
However, immediately after the end of that conversation, they sent an email, attached here, where they argued, without evidence, and despite the fact the support person said it was someone in Montreal named James, (I know no one in Montreal named James!) that the most likely explanation was that it was a friend or family
member. 😡 They would not refund.
After I sent a spirited reply demanding evidence they said they would only give it under supeona or a police investigation!! 🤯 (full text in image alt)
So ya hey AirBnB: Suck it.
I have gone back to my bank to have the number deactivated and put in a charge dispute. It could take up to 3 months for the charge to be refunded! #Privacy#Fraud#AirBnB#CreditCards#VanCity
Disroot (@disroot) is honestly one of the most underappreciated organisations. Their transparency, one of the best privacy policies and the amount of services they offer is really phenomenal
Got a question about #privacy. I know #Mastodon has robust privacy settings. I was wondering about the underlying protection of the system from massive data scrapers. Are there underlying protections built into Mastodon to prevent theft of data or the upload of data onto a third party website? On another vein, is there any way to limit your account reach in outside #search engines like #Google? Does Mastodon have limited interaction with outside search? Thanks!
4 Tools to Share Large Files Over the Internet Securely
These are privacy respecting tools to consider. But what signifies as a big file? Any file that you cannot seem to send through an encrypted messaging app like Signal or Telegram’s secret chat. Ideally, it should be anything more than 1 GB.
#Surveillance#Privacy#DataProtection#AdTech: "Nearly every time we load new content on an app or a Web site, ad-exchange companies—Google being the largest among them—broadcast data about our interests, finances, and vulnerabilities to determine exactly what we’ll see; more than a billion of these transactions take place in the U.S. every hour. Each of us, the data-privacy expert Wolfie Christl told me, has “dozens or even hundreds” of digital identifiers attached to our person; there’s an estimated eighteen-billion-dollar industry for location data alone. In August, 2022, Mozilla reviewed twenty pregnancy and period-tracking apps and found that fifteen of them made a “buffet” of personal data available to third parties, including addresses, I.P. numbers, sexual histories, and medical details. In most cases, the apps used vague language about when and how this data could be shared with law enforcement. (A 2020 foia lawsuit filed by the A.C.L.U. revealed that the Department of Homeland Security had purchased access to location data for millions of people in order to track them without a warrant. ice and C.B.P. subsequently said they would stop using such data.) The scholar Shoshana Zuboff has called this surveillance capitalism, “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.” Through our phones, we are under perpetual surveillance by companies that buy and sell data about what kind of person we are, whom we might vote for, what we might purchase, and what we might be nudged into doing." https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-hidden-pregnancy-experiment
Another data broker is telling me that they have a „legitimate interest“ in scraping and selling my data because they need to for their business. 🙄 That is not enough.
When someone claims legitimate interest, they have to show that your rights and freedoms do not outweigh their interests. „We want to because money!“ does not quite do that!
Disappointed to see The Markup share advice for people to use WhatsApp in its post about preparing your phone for a protest, and that it's coming from "digital security trainers."
Metadata literally kills, and WhatsApp is swimming in it. The metadata they collect includes:
Groups you're a member of, location, personal info (email, phone number, user IDs), contacts and their phone numbers, in-app search history, when you use the app & how often you use it. E2EE alone doesn't guarantee #privacy
If surveillance/personalized advertising is such a good way to match buyers and sellers, then research should show that people who use #privacy tools and settings are buying worse stuff...right?
If I were to do a talk at the information security conference #WICCON this October in NL, what topic would you want to hear more about? Other suggestions welcome in reply.
8 Ways Your Email Account Is Vulnerable to Hackers
"Ever wondered how hackers manage to hack an email account? Simple mistakes, like using a weak password, engaging with a phishing email, or using your account on a public computer, make it possible. We'll explain how you make your email account vulnerable to hackers and cover how to protect it"
"Smart TVs track your viewing habits using content recognition and voice capture for targeted advertising.
Disconnecting smart TVs from the internet can prevent data tracking, but limits functionality and will require you to use a streaming box for many tasks (which may also track you)"