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"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"As of this summer, though, Sift does have a file on you, which it can produce upon request. I got mine, and I found it shocking: More than 400 pages long, it contained all the messages I'd ever sent to hosts on Airbnb; years of Yelp delivery orders; a log of every time I'd opened the Coinbase app on my iPhone. Many entries included detailed information about the device I used to do these things, including my IP address at the time."

"Now, researchers warn that these "direct to consumer" services could be vulnerable to a sort of genetic hacking. By uploading selected DNA sequences, they say, it may be possible, for example, to pull out the genomes of most people in a database or to identify people with genetic variants associated with specific traits such as Alzheimer's disease."

"Fighting the creep of government use of face surveillance and the related risks can seem overwhelming. Police agencies, and the spy tech vendors that profit from the growth of a surveillance state, have much to gain by deploying this invasive spying technology. "

"But it is not just governments who will be interested in the results. The software is freely available and cheap. It is being distributed all over the internet of things, from intercoms to "home assistants". Once our faces are attached to the detailed digital identities that are already compiled by the advertising industry, any sufficiently sophisticated shopping mall will have a map of the preferences of everyone who enters its maw."

"The piece is meant to be a commentary on the collection and use of private data by tech companies, as Posters explained. "The fact that citizens' data - including intimate knowledge on political leanings, sexuality, psychological traits and personality - are made available to the highest bidder shows that the digital influence industry and its associated architectures pose a risk not only to individual human rights but to our democracies at large.""

"Prolific digital rights activism organization Fight for the Future has partnered with the group Students for Sensible Drug Policy to stop facial recognition technology from coming to college campuses. "

""The documents reveal a much clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It's the same people involved who we know are building on these same techniques," she said."

"A chat app that quickly became popular in the United Arab Emirates for communicating with friends and family is actually a spying tool used by the government to track its users, according to a New York Times report."

"At that point, experts began taking a closer look at the document, now publicly available on the web. They discovered something else of interest: yellow dots in a roughly rectangular pattern repeated throughout the page. They were barely visible to the naked eye, but formed a coded design. After some quick analysis, they seemed to reveal the exact date and time that the pages in question were printed: 06:20 on 9 May, 2017 - at least, this is likely to be the time on the printer's internal clock at that moment. The dots also encode a serial number for the printer. "

"The EU could temporarily ban the use of facial recognition technology in public places such as train stations, sport stadiums and shopping centres over fears about creeping surveillance of European citizens."

"A New York Times deep-dive into a facial recognition AI tool sold to law enforcement agencies uncovered that the company has amassed more than three billion images. Those images are scraped from all corners of the internet from social media sites to companies' "About Us" pages.  That's way more than the typical police or even FBI database. "

"Dozens of people who say they were subjected to death threats, racial slurs, and blackmail after their in-home Ring smart cameras were hacked are suing the company over "horrific" invasions of privacy."

"Since the world's first CCTV camera was installed in Germany in 1942, the number of surveillance cameras around the world has grown immensely. In fact, it only took us 79 years to go from one camera to nearly one billion of these devices. In the above interactive graphic, Surfshark maps out how prevalent CCTV surveillance cameras are in the world's 130 most populous cities. "