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"The most well-documented of these deals with the hash function used to "anonymize" the license and medallion numbers. A bit of lateral thinking from one civic hacker and the data was completely de-anonymized. This data can now be used to calculate, for example, any driver's annual income. More disquieting, though, in my opinion, is the privacy risk to passengers. With only a small amount of auxiliary knowledge, using this dataset an attacker could identify where an individual went, how much they paid, weekly habits, etc. I will demonstrate how easy this is to do in the following section."

"Chinese consumers are increasingly standing up to Internet giants for their digital privacy in an unprecedented way. China is in the early stages of setting up a data protection regulatory system. The Cyber Security Law, effective Jun 1, 2017, included for the first time a set of data protection provisions in the form of national-level legislation. The 2018 e-Commerce Law incorporated data privacy protections for consumers such as the "right to be forgotten", similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation."

"Privacy campaigners say the plan for the regional centres revives talk of "pseudonymised information" being extracted from medical records. That refers to a process whereby some personal identifiers are removed but not enough to make information completely anonymous."

"SINGAPORE - In the not too distant future, surveillance cameras sitting atop over 100,000 lampposts in Singapore could help authorities pick out and recognise faces in crowds across the island-state. The plan to install the cameras, which will be linked to facial recognition software, is raising privacy fears among security experts and rights groups. The government said the system would allow it to "perform crowd analytics" and support anti-terror operations."

"In amongst the numerous reports of privacy infringements, there have been a handful of genuine issues. Reports of Microsoft utilizing your computer as a P2P node for update sharing were completely founded, and the 13 pages of privacy settings are also no joke."

"As Reuters reports, on March 28 SpaceX sent out an email to all of its 6,000+ employees telling them access to the Zoom video chat service had been disabled. The email stated, "We understand that many of us were using this tool for conferences and meeting support ... Please use email, text or phone as alternate means of communication." The stated reason given for disabling access to the service is, "significant privacy and security concerns.""

"A draft government memo explaining how the NHS contact-tracing app could stem the spread of the coronavirus said ministers might be given the ability to order "de-anonymisation" to identify people from their smartphones, the Guardian can reveal. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced on Sunday that the UK planned to introduce an app that would enable people who developed Covid-19 symptoms to "anonymously" alert other users to whom they had been in close proximity. "All data will be handled according to the highest ethical and security standards, and would only be used for NHS care and research," he said."

"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."

"Amazon is to pay $25m (£20m) to settle allegations that it violated children's privacy rights with its Alexa voice assistant. The company agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after it was accused of failing to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents. It was found to have kept hold of sensitive data for years. Amazon's doorbell camera unit Ring will also pay out after giving employees unrestricted access to customers' data."

""What is emerging is that [Aadhaar] is being used to create a panopticon, a centralized database that's linked to every aspect of our lives - finances, travel, birth, deaths, marriage, education, employment, health, etc.," Reetika Khera, an Indian economist and social scientist, told VICE News. Security concerns have plagued the system for years, but in recent weeks criticism has grown deafeningly loud. Earlier this month, as part of the Supreme Court case on privacy, an activist's freedom of information request suggested that foreign firms were being given "full access" to the classified data - including fingerprints and iris scans."

"A data trust is a legal entity that collects and manages people's personal data on their behalf. Though the structure and function of these trusts are still being defined, and many questions remain, data trusts are notable for offering a potential solution to long-standing problems in privacy and security."

"Three months passed. Then, on Wednesday, anonymous government officials reportedly confirmed that a local company called Systems Engineering of Egypt (SEE or See Egypt) had won the bid to develop the system, which would allegedly allow the Egyptian government to sniff and analyze Internet and social media activity, as well as intercept Skype, WhatsApp and Viber conversations. "

"The app, called Care19, and produced by a company called ProudCrowd that also makes a location-based social networking app for North Dakota State sports fans, generates a random ID number for each person who uses it. Then, it can "anonymously cache the individual's locations throughout the day," storing information about where people spent at least 10 minutes at a time, according to the state website. If users test positive for the coronavirus, they can provide that information to the North Dakota Department of Health for contact-tracing purposes so that other people who spent time near virus patients can potentially be notified."

"Apple has warned the UK government that proposals in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill to demand technology firms weaken encryption would make the data of millions of law-abiding citizens less secure and make it easier for hackers to "cause chaos"."

"They aren't limited by human notions of attention; they can watch everyone at the same time. So while it may be true that using encryption is something the NSA takes special note of, not using it doesn't mean you'll be noticed less. The best defense is to use secure services, even if it might be a red flag. Think of it this way: you're providing cover for those who need encryption to stay alive."

Ahhh ITGS group - a great discussion on the evoting problem would have been perfect for your Paper 2. "Remember: all of these principles of security, anonymity and verifiability have to be achieved in an understandable way. If they can't be then you get the opportunity for losers to claim fraud, and their supporters to believe them."

"Serious security flaws that could let attackers steal sensitive data, including passwords and banking information, have been found in processors designed by Intel, AMD and ARM. The flaws, named Meltdown and Spectre, were discovered by security researchers at Google's Project Zero in conjunction with academic and industry researchers from several countries. Combined they affect virtually every modern computer, including smartphones, tablets and PCs from all vendors and running almost any operating system."

"Given the government's obsession with passing cybersecurity legislation, you would think they'd be happy that Apple and Google are making it harder for foreign governments and criminals to break into people's phones or company servers to steal your data. But you'd be forgetting that the head of the FBI and his fellow fear-mongerers are still much more concerned with making sure they retain control over your privacy, rather than protecting everyone's cybersecurity."

"The message seems to be that if you really want to keep something private, treat it as a secret, and in the age of algorithmic analysis and big data, perhaps best to follow Winston Smith's bitter lesson from Nineteen Eighty-Four: "If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.""