Consumers enjoy recommendations based on their television viewing habits (“viewers who watched Mr. Robot… may enjoy Fight Club”), but who else knows what you’re watching? The golden age of television has arrived with the golden age of television tracking. In 2016, virtually all television delivery systems – smart TVs, streaming devices, game consoles, apps, and even old-fashioned set top boxes – track consumers’ viewing habits, and sometimes in new and unexpected ways. Television and streaming device manufacturers, software developers, and the advertising industry are collaborating to learn more about what consumers are watching. These collaborations are allowing advertisers to precisely target consumers and better understand what ads are working. Consumers may even find advertisements based on their television viewing habits appearing on their phones and desktop browsers.

The Federal Trade Commission said Monday that Vizio used 11 million televisions to spy on its customers. The television maker agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle a case with the FTC and the New Jersey attorney general's office after the agencies accused it of secretly collecting — and selling — data about its customers' locations, demographics and viewing habits.

I am now the owner of a new “smart” TV, which promises to deliver streaming multimedia content, games, apps, social media and Internet browsing. Oh, and TV too.

The only problem is that I’m now afraid to use it. You would be too — if you read through the 46-page privacy policy.

The amount of data this thing collects is staggering. It logs where, when, how and for how long you use the TV. It sets tracking cookies and beacons designed to detect “when you have viewed particular content or a particular email message.” It records “the apps you use, the websites you visit, and how you interact with content.” It ignores “do-not-track” requests as a considered matter of policy.

It also has a built-in camera — with facial recognition. The purpose is to provide “gesture control” for the TV and enable you to log in to a personalized account using your face. On the upside, the images are saved on the TV instead of uploaded to a corporate server. On the downside, the Internet connection makes the whole TV vulnerable to hackers who have demonstrated the ability to take complete control of the machine.

More troubling is the microphone. The TV boasts a “voice recognition” feature that allows viewers to control the screen with voice commands. But the service comes with a rather ominous warning: “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.” Got that? Don’t say personal or sensitive stuff in front of the TV.

You may be loving your new Internet-connected television and its convenient voice-command feature—but did you know it’s recording everything you say and sending it to a third party?

Left: Samsung SmartTV privacy policy, warning users not to discuss personal info in front of their TV Right: 1984

Samsung has confirmed that its "smart TV" sets are listening to customers' every word, and the company is warning customers not to speak about personal information while near the TV sets.

In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about gover

Online tracking gets more accurate and harder to evade.

Un chercheur en sécurité russe a découvert une faille dans la synchronisation entre iCloud et Safari qui permettait de récupérer les historiques de navigation supprimés par l’utilisateur. Un comportement apparemment possible suite à une erreur de la part d’Apple, que le constructeur s’empresse actuellement de corriger.

Researchers have found a way to connect the dots between people’s private online activity and their Twitter accounts—even for people who have never tweeted.

TL;DR: Facebook collects data about you in hundreds of ways, across numerous channels. It’s very hard to opt out, but by reading about what they collect, you can understand the risks of the platform and choose to be more restrictive with your Facebook usage.

"As any other social media website Twitter know a lot of things about you, thanks [to] metadata," a French security researcher known as X0rz wrote in a recent blog post. "Indeed, for a 140 characters message you will get A LOT of metadata—more than 20 times the size of the initial content you typed in! And guess what? Almost all of this metadata is accessible through the open Twitter API." To demonstrate that, X0rz wrote a Python script called tweets_analyzer, a command-line tool to tap into some of Twitter's vast metadata that may not be accessible from the standard client.

By default, Windows sends a lot of your information to their servers sometimes without asking you to opt-in. Follow this guide to fix Windows 10 and restore your privacy.

Over time more and more users published instructions on how to break Microsoft's habit of spying on their users, including for private users whose computers are not part of a company or enterprise domain. I was annoyed that this leads to manually clicking checkmarks on a graphical user interface or running confusing PowerShell scripts and merge several single rule-sets. With the webpage https://fix10.isleaked.com/ I had the idea to build a tool, which is easily extendable and configurable and can automate the process of reaching an adequate level of privacy on the press of a button.

How private companies leak your personal data into the public domain, and how you can buy it.

How thousands of companies are profiling, categorizing, rating and affecting the lives of billions

Ultrasound technology has a number of desirable features: it is easy to deploy, flexible, and inaudible by humans. This technology is already utilized in a number of different real-world applications, such as device pairing, proximity detection, and cross-device tracking.