"The core business of the plaintiff is to deliver ads to its visitors. Journalistic content is just a vehicle to get readers to view the ads." – Axel Springer’s lawyer

The makers of the We-Vibe, a line of vibrators that can be paired with an app for remote-controlled use, have reached a $3.75 million class action settlement with users following allegations that the company was collecting data on when and how the sex toy was used.

This is very similar to our earlier work on the security of MAC address randomization: http://papers.mathyvanhoef.com/asiaccs2016.pdf They provide some more practical details if you want to implement our probe request fingerprint tracking mechanism. This is a passive tracking technique.

Their method to track all devices requires actively sending packets for every single MAC address that is being tracked. The (imperfect) passive tracking techniques can be used to reduce the number of MAC addresses you have to try though. Nice finding overall! And it will likely be hard to patch this issue..

Sometimes there are also silly driver bugs that allow you to get the real MAC address of a device when the user is using a spoofed MAC address :) http://www.mathyvanhoef.com/2013/11/unmasking-spoofed-mac-address.html

Pry-Fi will prevent your device from announcing all the networks it knows to the outside world, but it will still allow background scanning and automatically connecting to Wi-Fi networks. While you are not connected to a Wi-Fi network, the MAC address will constantly be pseudo-randomized, following a pattern that still makes the trackers think you are a real person, but they will not encounter your MAC address again. This will slowly poison their tracking database with useless information.

With every click on Facebook, you leave a little trail of your social life. Now researchers are saying they can piece those clues together, and pick out who your closest friends are.

The suspect in a murder case consents to Amazon sharing audio fragments possibly recorded on an Echo device.

Man filmed his partner's labor, then sued TV companies that picked up the video.

The firm also claims to have surveillance capabilities to extract data from 'many web accounts and apps'.

Search giant modifies terms of service to specifically state ‘automated systems analyse your content’. By Samuel Gibbs

A court ruling could make it difficult to trust U.S. tech companies with private information.

A recent report says Samsung’s Internet-connected Smart TV might be listening in on your conversations and transmitting them to a third party via a voice control feature meant to change channels, adjust volume, browse apps and more.

Shane Harris of The Daily Beast noticed last week that the Smart TV’s privacy policy includes the following clause: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.”

The company confirmed to The Huffington Post that the feature does send voice control requests to a third party, which then searches for results and returns them to the user’s device. Samsung doesn’t store or sell the voice data, she said.

VIZIO, Inc., one of the world’s largest manufacturers and sellers of internet-connected “smart” televisions, has agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission and the Office of the New Jersey Attorney General that it installed software on its TVs to collect viewing data on 11 million consumer TVs without consumers’ knowledge or consent.

The data generated when you watch television can reveal a lot about you and your household. So, before a company pulls up a chair next to you and starts taking careful notes on everything you watch (and then shares it with its partners), it should ask if that’s O.K. with you. VIZIO wasn’t doing that, and the FTC stepped in.