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An app circulated among the protesters in Hong Kong that supposedly was for coordinating protest efforts, but was in reality a phishing attack that would track keystrokes, messages, and identity information of devices it was installed on. Many signs point to the Chinese government as the origin of the malware, though. Not the first time a government has done something like planting spies and monitoring protestors. We saw this in Little Brother too, with the DHS spies on the Xnet.

This article is about a smartphone that's designed specifically to help you keep your personal information secure--it lets you easily encrypt your calls and texts and search the internet privately. There's also a video about ways to encrypt your email.

Nice find. I'm reminded of DuckDuckGo, https://duckduckgo.com/, the search engine that doesn't track you. At all.

At a New York state elementary school, teachers can use a behavior-monitoring app to compile information on which children have positive attitudes and which act out. In Georgia, some high school cafeterias are using a biometric identification system to let students pay for lunch by scanning the palms of their hands at the checkout line.

Because Snowden wrote it

Some retailers use Euclid Analytics, which uses the Wi-Fi antennas inside stores to see how many people are coming into a store, how long they stay and even which aisles they walk. It does this by using signals from each smartphone that comes near the store.

The first piece of advice in the article for protecting personal information is to download Signal, the encrypted messaging service we discussed in class.

Advice: always assume that you are being hacked; use strong passwords; don't trust security questions to protect your data

Advice: Be careful with what information is stored on online devices. Always assume that the information can be leaked so you are never too vulnerable to an attack. Keep a strong password to protect your information

"Attorney General William P. Barr took aim at Facebook's plan to make WhatsApp and its other messaging services more secure, pressing its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to create a loophole to that goal of full encryption."

This journalist covers cyber-security and seems to know her stuff.