"The secure email service used by US whistleblower Edward Snowden has shut down rather than comply with orders from US security services - and is also legally barred from speaking out.
The owner and operator of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, took the service down yesterday "for maintenance" before revealing today that the real reason was demands from US intelligence."
"After discussing the general absurdity and creepiness of not being allowed to freely criticize the government for the order they brought to his company, he concludes by saying that he's stopped using email altogether, and "If you knew what I know about email, you might not use it either." "
"The "March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance," a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government's secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings."
"With news that the 15 million Twitter users in the UK can now be targeted at individual postcode levels, the micro-blogging platform is selling its advertising opportunities as ultra-geographically precise, and therefore ultra-cost effective.
"The key benefit of geo-targeting is that it enables advertisers, or in this case political parties, the ability to reach users in specific regions, metropolitan areas and now postcodes," Twitter said in a blog post. "
"The tech giant revealed updates to the controversial tool on Monday that include improving the accuracy and functionality of its face analysis features such as identifying gender, emotions and age range."
"Twitter sent a letter this week to the small start-up company, Clearview AI, demanding that it stop taking photos and any other data from the social media website "for any reason" and delete any data that it previously collected, a Twitter spokeswoman said. "
"We now know targeted Facebook advertising played a big role in 2015's general election.
The Conservatives spent £1.2m on Facebook advertising in 2015 - and it paid off with a majority, albeit a small one. It is understood both them and Labour plan on spending similar amounts on Facebook advertising. "
"Referred to in the Indian press variously as the "toolkit case", the "Greta toolkit", and the "toolkit conspiracy", the police's ongoing investigation of Ravi, along with fellow activists Nikita Jacob and Shantanu Muluk, centres on the contents of a social media guide that Thunberg tweeted to her nearly 5 million followers in early February. When Ravi was arrested, the Delhi police declared that she "is an editor of the Toolkit Google Doc & key conspirator in document's formulation & dissemination. She started WhatsApp Group & collaborated to make the Toolkit doc. She worked closely with them to draft the Doc.""
"So when I discovered the pocket of Instagram where you can find out what it thinks you're interested in (on the app, you'll find it under Settings> Security> Access data > Ads), I obviously felt it my duty as a netizen to see what dark insights it had into my private soul.
Here goes: jewellery; luxury goods; electronic music; love; emotions; fashion design; crafts. I mean: no offence, Kraftwerk (and loved ones) but I could not name eight things I am less interested in. Maybe oxbow lakes."
"U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION purchased technology that vacuums up reams of personal information stored inside cars, according to a federal contract reviewed by The Intercept, illustrating the serious risks in connecting your vehicle and your smartphone."
"Personal information of more than 243 million Brazilians was exposed for more than six months thanks to weakly encoded credentials stored in the source code of the Brazilian Ministry of Health's website. The data leak exposed both living and deceased Brazilians' medical records to possible unauthorized access. The incident was the second reported by Brazilian publication Estadão and among several others recently affecting South America's largest nation's healthcare system."
"This is an abuse of the concept of consent and risks desensitizing people to surveillance. Eproctoring also treats students as if they are guilty until proven innocent, which is a concerning and disrespectful stance for any academic institution to take."
What do you think?
"The submission outlines Big Blue's belief that facial recognition is fine in a "1 to 1" context such as unlocking a phone. But IBM is opposed to "1 to many" facial recognition that refers to a database to identify a face in a crowd and could therefore be used for "mass surveillance systems, racial profiling or other human rights violations.""
"POLICE IN CHINA'S Liaoning province were sitting on mounds of data collected through invasive means: financial records, travel information, vehicle registrations, social media, and surveillance camera footage. To make sense of it all, they needed sophisticated analytic software. Enter American business computing giant Oracle, whose products could find relevant data in the police department's disparate feeds and merge it with information from ongoing investigations."
"The verdict against Haneen Hossam, Mowada al-Adham and three others came after they had posted footage on the video-sharing app TikTok. The ruling, which can be appealed, included a fine of 300,000 Egyptian pounds (£14,600) for each defendant."
"The tool tracks every click and interaction by employees and presents managers with leaderboards showing relative "productivity" of each employee, down to how many mentions they get in workplace emails."
"Rival French and Russian disinformation campaigns have sought to deceive and influence internet users in the Central African Republic ahead of an election later this month, Facebook said on Tuesday.
Facebook said it was the first time it had seen foreign influence operations directly engage on its platforms, with fake accounts denouncing each other as "fake news"."
"Costco customers at four of the retailer's Chicago-area warehouses may have had their payment information compromised after employees discovered five card-skimming devices during routine PIN pad inspections at the end of August.
"We promptly removed the skimmers, notified law enforcement, and engaged a forensics firm to analyze the devices," A Costco spokesperson told FOX Business in a statement. "It appears that these skimmers had the ability to capture information on the magnetic stripe of a payment card, including name, card number, expiration date, and CVV.""
"The slightly misleading name for this resource is "personal data." Whether handed over intentionally or unwittingly, it captured by social media, cookies, and the internet of things captures, second-by-second now, granular details of behavior, temperament, and even thinking. It is an enormously valuable asset because it can be used to draw inferences not just about the expected future behavior of the producing subject."