6 private links
The latest version of the bot detector reCaptcha is invisible to users and has spread to more than 650,000 websites. It’s great for security—but not so great for your privacy.
Security researchers say they have uncovered a massive espionage campaign involving the theft of call records from hacked cell network providers to conduct targeted surveillance on individuals of interest. The hackers have systematically broken in to more than 10 cell networks around the world to d…
Several employees were caught abusing the tool, which let them read users’ messages and passwords.
“The whole premise of Facebook is to render not private” your activity, said company lawyer, fighting off lawsuits over Cambridge Analytica data collection.
Two lawsuits are seeking class-action status, alleging that Amazon records children and stores their voiceprints indefinitely.
As you shop, “beacons” are watching you, using hidden technology in your phone.
My wife got a box of Enfamil Fedexed to our door as a promotion on what would have been the due date of our baby. Unfortunately, she miscarried at 3 months.
They knew this because marketers get near real-time access to prescriptions, hospital admissions and other things.
You should care because your information will be sold or traded, and behaviors can be correlated against medical and other outcomes.
Are you a divorced dad who has moved within 90 days and play daily fantasy sports? I can buy a list that will find you for $250. You are a risk for opioid addiction and may get denied service in the future for medical issues. Or you may attract advertising tailored to get you to gamble or drink more, when you are at your most vulnerable.
Facebook uncovered emails that appear to show CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s connection to potentially problematic privacy practices at the company.
No, Google won’t stop reading your emails. And you may not actually want it to. The search giant introduced a significant change to the way it treats its users’ emails Friday, announcing that…
It used a Shazam-like technology to identify soccer games
From the author of uBlock on this:
What we see are the public statements, for public consumption, they are designed to "sell" the changes to the wider public. What we do not see is what is being said in private meetings by officers who get to decide how to optimize the business. So we have to judge not by what is said for public consumption purpose, but by what in effect is being done, or what they plan to do.
This is how personally I see the deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API in manifest v3:
In order for Google Chrome to reach its current user base, it had to support content blockers -- these are the top most popular extensions for any browser. Google strategy has been to find the optimal point between the two goals of growing the user base of Google Chrome and preventing content blockers from harming its business.
The blocking ability of the webRequest API caused Google to yield control of content blocking to content blockers. Now that Google Chrome is the dominant browser, it is in a better position to shift the optimal point between the two goals which benefits Google's primary business.
The deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome.
Sometimes it’s worth pausing to ask the simplest questions.
On June 4th, Firefox will be rolling out this feature, Enhanced Tracking Protection, to all new users on by default, to make it harder for over a thousand companies to track their every move.
The social network wants to dismiss a lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Fingerprinting is a type of online tracking that’s different from cookies or ordinary trackers. Now you can block fingerprinting with Firefox.