Privacy Blog

"Friends don’t let friends get spied on.' – Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation and longtime advocate of privacy in technology.

Legal Affairs

Leave a comment

A Court Tried To Force Ancestry.com To Open Up Its DNA Database To Police. The Company Said No.

From an article by Peter Aldhous in the BuzzFeed News web site: “Ancestry.com, the largest DNA testing company in the world, was served a search warrant to give police access to its database of some 16 million DNA profiles, but the company did not comply. “Ancestry received one request seeking access to Ancestry’s DNA database through a search warrant,” the company revealed in its 2019 transparency report released last week. […]

Continue Reading →

Leave a comment

Facebook Settles Lawsuit Over Its Use of Facial Recognition for $550 Million

After years of wrangling in courts, Facebook finally has settled a lawsuit over its privacy-invasive use of facial recognition. Last year it agreed to stop turning on the tech to scan photos by default, which built a template of your facial data, and automatically suggested tags in photos based on it. Details may be found in an article by Richard Lawler in the engadget web site at https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/30/facebook-photo-tagging-facial-recognition. In other […]

Continue Reading →

Leave a comment

Apple Privacy Officer says that ‘Building Back Doors’ to Access iPhone Data Won’t Help Solve Crimes

Several governments, including the U.S., are pressuring Apple and other manufacturers to add “back doors” to all products that offer encryption. The latest example is a demand on Monday of this week when the FBI sent a letter to Apple requesting assistance to extract data from password-protected iPhones used by a suspected mass shooter. You can read more about that “demand” in an article by Kif Leswing published in the […]

Continue Reading →

Leave a comment

Brazil Fines Facebook $1.6 Million for Improper Sharing of User Data

According to an article in the Reuters news agency: “Brazil’s Ministry of Justice said on Monday it fined U.S. tech giant Facebook Inc 6.6 million reais ($1.6 million U.S.) for improperly sharing user data. “The ministry’s department of consumer protection said it had found that data from 443,000 Facebook users was improperly made available to developers of an App called ‘thisisyourdigitallife.’ The data was being shared for ‘questionable’ purposes, the […]

Continue Reading →

Leave a comment

Facebook Tells US Attorney General It’s Not Prepared To Get Rid Of Encryption On WhatsApp And Messenger

Facebook said it would not weaken end-to-end encryption across its messaging apps, despite pressure from world governments, in a letter to US Attorney General Bill Barr and UK and Australian leaders. From a report by Ryan Mac in the BuzzFeed News: “People’s private messages would be less secure and the real winners would be anyone seeking to take advantage of that weakened security,” the company wrote to leaders in the […]

Continue Reading →

Leave a comment

FTC officially rules that Cambridge Analytica deceived Facebook Users

There’s no surprise here: More than 18 months after the scandal first broke, the Federal Trade Commission has officially ruled that Cambridge Analytica deceived consumers through its data-gathering practices. Details may be found in an article by Colin Lecher in TheVerge web site at: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/6/20999078/ftc-cambridge-analytica-facebook-users-official-ruling-privacy-scandal.

Continue Reading →