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"The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself."

"Yet the balance of experimental evidence over the past thirty years suggests that this is not the case. Not only would removing anonymity fail to consistently improve online community behavior - forcing real names in online communities could also increase discrimination and worsen harassment."

""This is all identifiable in the smart meter data - it has literally your entire the pattern of life and behaviour through just monitoring where you live and what you do in your home." Vector and AWS say the data is anonymised and cannot be linked back to customers. Privacy advocates dispute that, because the way some customers use power in certain locations will easily identify them. For the companies, it's a tightrope: the more anonymous the data is made, the less value it has overall."

""History sniffing" promises a nose full of dust or, you're talking about web browsers, a whiff of the websites you've visited. And that may be enough to compromise your privacy and expose data that allows miscreants to target you more effectively with tailored attacks. For example, a phishing gambit that attempts to simulate your bank login page has a better chance of success if it presents the web page for a bank where you actually have an account."

"Intentions aside, the app seems to cross some pretty serious privacy boundaries. Generally speaking, people like to choose who they identify themselves to, and having your online information freely available to anyone who sees you in public seems an uncomfortable prospect. Google seems to think so, too; the Web giant does not currently allow facial recognition apps on the MyGlass app store. "

"The deluge of claims trying to exercise the "right to be forgotten" follows a decision by Europe's highest court, which said that in some cases the right to privacy of individuals outweighs the freedom of search engines to link to information about them although the information itself can remain on web pages."

"The type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor's web browser to draw a hidden image, and was first documented in a upcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user's device a number that uniquely identifies it."

"Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in the system software used in millions of computers, opening the possibility that attackers could execute arbitrary commands on web servers, other Linux-based machines and even Mac computers."

"They are a modest correction against failures in algorithmic prioritisation on the indelible web. Before the requests go to the BBC, individuals must prove to Google - which has every interest in rejecting their claim - that the links contain personal information that is inaccurate, irrelevant or out of date, and holds no public interest."

"Google has launched a webpage where European citizens can request that links to information about them be taken off search results, the first step to comply with a court ruling affirming the "right to be forgotten". The company, which processes more than 90% of all web searches in Europe, has made available a webform through which people can submit their requests but has stopped short of specifying when it will remove links that meet the criteria for being taken down."

""The email has good spelling and grammar and my exact home address...when I say exact I mean, not the way my address is written by those autofill sections on web pages, but the way I write my address. "My tummy did a bit of a somersault when I read that, because I wondered who on earth I could owe £800 to and what was about to land on my doormat." She quickly realised it was a scam and did not click on the link."

"A hacker has stolen millions of user account details from popular education platform Edmodo, and the data is apparently for sale on the so-called dark web. Teachers, students and parents use Edmodo to work on lesson plans, assign homework, and more. The organization claims to have over 78 million members."

"Most people are aware of the cookies that track them across the web, and the privacy-invading practices of Google search, but did you know Google's email service, Gmail, collects large amounts of data too? This was recently put into stark focus for iPhone users when Gmail published its app "privacy label" - a self-declared breakdown of the data it collects and shares with advertisers as part of a new stipulation on the Apple App Store."

"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 dataset that we analyzed in this report spanned hundreds of users over several months. Phone records held by the NSA and telecoms span millions of Americans over multiple years. Reasonable minds can disagree about the policy and legal constraints that should be imposed on those databases. The science, however, is clear: phone metadata is highly sensitive."