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""Mexico's capacity to spy on its citizens is immense. [And] it's extremely easy for the technology and the information obtained through the spyware to fall into private hands - be it organised crime or commercial," said Jorge Rebolledo, a Mexico City security consultant. "What we know about is only the tip of the iceberg." Andrés Manuel López Obrador Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The data leak is a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, since 2016, are believed to have been selected as belonging to people of interest by government clients of NSO Group."

"German Green party MP, Malte Spitz, went a step further and published 6 months of records kept (at the time by law) by his phone company about him. To emphasise how scary it was privacy-wise he published it in the form of a minute by minute interactive map, so anyone could follow his exact location (just like the phone company) as though in real time from the location metadata his phone was giving away all the time. The metadata was combined with his freely available social networking data, allowing anyone to see not just where he was but often what he was doing. Germany no longer requires phone companies to keep this metadata, but other countries have antiterrorist laws that require similar information to be kept for everyone. You can explore Malte's movements at (archived link: www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention) to get an idea of how your life is being tracked by metadata."

"Ransomware analysts offered several possible explanations for why the master key has now appeared. It is possible Kaseya, a government entity, or a collective of victims paid the ransom. The Kremlin in Russia also might have seized the key from the criminals and handed it over through intermediaries, experts said."

"I heard from one political dissident about a suspicious motorcycle parked in front of his London house. When the police checked it out, they found a wifi router connected to the bike's battery with the same name as his home's wifi. There's a name for this attack: "evil twin"."

"It's actually a big myth that search engines need to track your personal search history to make money or deliver quality search results. Almost all of the money search engines make (including Google) is based on the keywords you type in, without knowing anything about you, including your search history or the seemingly endless amounts of additional data points they have collected about registered and non-registered users alike. In fact, search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people….This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model. "

"Japanese idol Ena Matsuoka was attacked outside her home last month after a fan figured out her address from selfies she posted on social media - just by zooming in on the reflection on her pupils, according to media reports."

"Vast sums are being spent by governments across the industrialized and developing worlds on automating poverty and in the process, turning the needs of vulnerable citizens into numbers, replacing the judgment of human caseworkers with the cold, bloodless decision-making of machines. "

"One in three councils are using computer algorithms to help make decisions about benefit claims and other welfare issues, despite evidence emerging that some of the systems are unreliable."

"A technology company has created an electronic badge that can monitor workers' conversations, posture and even time spent in the toilet"

"A widely used algorithm that predicts which patients will benefit from extra medical care dramatically underestimates the health needs of the sickest black patients, amplifying long-standing racial disparities in medicine, researchers have found."

"Jim Baker served as the FBI's general counsel from 2014 until 2017, and he presided over the the FBI's attempt to force Apple to undermine its cryptography under the rubric of investigating the San Bernadino shooters; he has long been a prominent advocate for mass surveillance, but he has had a change of heart: in a long, detailed essay on Lawfare, Baker explains why he believes that governments should not seek to introduce defects into cryptographic systems."

"Hundreds of Facebook employees have signed a letter to executive Mark Zuckerberg decrying his decision to allow politicians to post advertisements on the platform that include false claims."

""This is the first time such machine learning tools have been used in this context," says Fluri, "and we found that the deep artificial neural network enables us to extract more information from the data than previous approaches. We believe that this usage of machine learning in cosmology will have many future applications.""

"Now, there's a new concern: malicious apps developed by third parties and hosted by Amazon or Google. The threat isn't just theoretical. Whitehat hackers at Germany's Security Research Labs developed eight apps-four Alexa "skills" and four Google Home "actions"-that all passed Amazon or Google security-vetting processes. The skills or actions posed as simple apps for checking horoscopes, with the exception of one, which masqueraded as a random-number generator. Behind the scenes, these "smart spies," as the researchers call them, surreptitiously eavesdropped on users and phished for their passwords."

YES IAN YOU SHOULD BE READING THIS! "The authors raise three arguments: first, that "notice and choice" has been a failure ("to opt out simply stay indoors!"); second, that facial recognition fears are technophobic overreactions, and finally, that facial recognition is uniquely powerful and dangerous and needs a regulatory framework separate from other privacy rules ("to opt out, just don't have a face")."

Motka Manjhi had been back and forth to the ration shop four or five times, his wife said, but on each occasion he returned empty-handed. His thumbprint, needed to prove his identity, wasn't registering on the new system."

"Oliver also pointed to a Finnish man who once found "one of the most severe security flaws ever discovered in a voting system" in US machines and alerted their manufacturers, who released a patch to fix the problem in 2006. The state of Georgia, however, never installed it, and the Senate report noted their machines hadn't been updated since at least 2005. "They'd essentially been hitting the 'remind me tomorrow' button on a critical security update for over a decade," Oliver explained, "meaning Georgia's election systems operate on the same level of technical proficiency as Every Dad"."

"A whistleblower who works in Project Nightingale, the secret transfer of the personal medical data of up to 50 million Americans from one of the largest healthcare providers in the US to Google, has expressed anger to the Guardian that patients are being kept in the dark about the massive deal."