Do you have an Android phone? If so, do you have an anti-virus app installed in it? If you answered “Yes” to both questions, you need to read the article by Catalin Cimpanu in the ZDNet web site at: https://www.zdnet.com/article/two-thirds-of-all-android-antivirus-apps-are-frauds.
In the June 19, 2018 edition of this blog, I wrote about a new, tiny cell phone that was expected to ship within a few weeks. My description of the World’s Smallest 4G Rugged Smartphone is still available at: https://wp.me/p5httC-18b. Since that article was published, Unihertz indeed has started shipping these tiny cell phones. I received mine a few days ago and thought I would report on my experiences with […]
Remember that giant poster that Apple put up in Las Vegas during the recent Consumer Electronics Show that stated “what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone?” Never mind. A 14-year-old iPhone user discovered it is easy to listen in on someone else’s FaceTime conversations without anyone in the conversation knowing that someone is listening. OOOPS!
AT&T obviously is helping the U.S. government in its mass surveillance operations. The company claims that divulging such spying would almost certainly be classified by the U.S. government. This comes despite leaks that suggest a close relationship with the telecoms industry and federal intelligence agencies. AT&T said it complies with government data requests “only to the extent required by law.”
According to an article in Slashdot: On Thursday, AT&T announced it was stopping the sale of its customers’ real-time location data to all third parties, in response to a Motherboard investigation showing how data from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint trickled down through a complex network of companies until eventually landing the hands of bounty hunters and people unauthorized to handle it. To verify the existence of this trade, Motherboard paid […]
If you are concerned about your privacy, delete the so-called free Weather Channel app from your smartphone right now. Why? It isn’t really free. It steals your personal information. The Weather Channel app records the 45 million monthly active users’ locations every time the app is used, then sells the information to as many as 40 third-party companies without telling any users what is happening to their private information that was […]
Mark Wilson has published an article in the FastCompany website that I hope every cell phone manufacturer’s engineers will read and consider. Wilson is in favor of smartphones but feels that each smartphone also should have a switch to convert it into a dumb phone. His definition of a dumb phone is that it would function like the old-fashioned flip phones and “candy bar” phones that make and receive phone […]
“Privacy is possible. Signal makes it easy.” Signal is a very popular safe and secure replacement for cell phone text messaging systems. Best of all, it is available FREE of charge. If you have an Android device, an iPhone, an iPad, or an iPod Touch, Signal will supplement or replace your present text messaging app. Your cell phone will continue to send and receive normal text messages as it always […]
According to an article By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Natasha Singer in the New York Times: “At least 75 companies receive people’s precise location data from hundreds of apps whose users enable location services for benefits such as weather alerts, The New York Times found. The companies use, store or sell the information to help advertisers, investment firms and others.” You can read more, including instructions on how to stop Android […]
I have written about Zello several times. See https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aprivacyblog.com+zello&t=h_&ia=web for a list of my past articles about this very useful and very private cell phone app. Now it seems that a court in Connecticut has learned how private the app really is. Various laws require police officers to turn over their personal phone records, if subpoenaed and if the phones were used for official police business. New London police officers […]
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