Template:News/Updates
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- 18 July 2021 - Non-profits Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International obtain internal data from cyberweapons developer NSO Group revealing that 'hundreds of business executives, religious figures, academics, NGO employees, union officials and government officials, including cabinet ministers, presidents and prime ministers' have likely been spied upon using Pegasus malware, in many cases by nation-states who buy this capability from NSO group.[The Guardian]
- A selection of likely targets of Pegasus:
- Heads of State: Emmanuel Macron (President of France), Mostafa Madbouly (Prime Minister of Egypt), Barham Salih (President of Iraq), Saad Hariri (Prime Minister of Lebanon), Saadeddine Othmani (Prime Minister of Morocco), Imran Khan (Prime Minister of Pakistan)
- Journalists: Jamal Khashoggi (murdered on orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman), Szabolcs Panyi, Siddharth Varadarajan, Cecilio Pineda Birto (assassinated weeks after the suspected hack), Edwy Plenel
- Activists: Loujain al-Hathloul (women's right activist, kidnapped and tortured by Sudi regime)
- Political opponents: Rahul Gandhi (political opponent of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi), György Gémesi (Hungarian politician), w:G. Parameshwara
- A selection of likely targets of Pegasus:
- 14 July 2021 - Majority of iOS users deny tracking prompts, devastating the surveillance business that big tech companies like Facebook are running, proving that people care about privacy when they do have meaningful choices to make. [Bloomberg]
- 14 July 2021 - New reporting suggest that various data brokers have the ability to link the supposedly pseudonymous advertising IDs with real life identities 'at scale' thus offering fine grained insight into the lives of anyone with a smartphone to any willing buyer. [Vice]
- 10 July 2021 - Oft recommended privacy conscious US mobile carrier Mint Mobile suffers a data breach. [BleepingComputer]
- 7 July 2021 - A routine prenatal test of Chinese origin, developed in collaboration with People's Liberation Army, is being used to collect vast amounts of DNA data. [Reuter]
- 6 July 2021 - New EU law relaxes the rules around message privacy to allow service providers to rummage through your messages looking for child sexual abuse materials. No word yet on how EU intends to force child abusers to use these compromised platforms when they already use darkweb and strong crypto which won't be affected by this law. [EURACTIV]
- 5 July 2021 - Popular FOSS audio editor Audacity is in hot water after the new owner of the project changes the privacy policy and adds data collection mechanisms. [PCMag]
- 3 July 2021 - Amsterdam District Court rejects Facebook's arguments regarding the litigation brought by two Dutch non-profits, Data Privacy Foundation and Consumentenbond, who claim that Facebook does not have a proper legal basis for data processing in the Netherlands, clearing the way for the case to be heard in October. [TechCrunch]
- 30 June 2021 - US state of Maine bans facial recognition tech possession and its use by virtually all public officials and employees. [EPIC]
- 28 June 2021 - Data scrape of 700 million LinkedIn users appears for sale online. [threatpost]
- 25 June 2021 - US Supreme Court limits standing to sue for victims of credit-related privacy data breaches. [Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)]
- 24 June 2021 - Full bench of 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules that Baltimore's police's drone surveillance of the whole city violates the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. [Reuters]
- 24 June 2021 - Google delays blocking of third party cookies due to regulatory pressure. [Reuters]
- 21 June 2021 - Texas power companies secretly raised temperature on customers' 'smart' thermostats to help with grid load during summer.[Business Insider]
- 19 June 2021 - Google force-installs Massachusetts' contact tracing app for some users, without consent.[BleepingComputer]
- 17 June 2021 - Colorado becomes the third US state to pass a comprehensive consumer privacy legislation, following California and Virginia. [The Colorado Sun]
- 17 June 2021 - CVS Pharmacy exposes health records of 1.1 billion customers. [Threatpost]
- 17 June 2021 - Carnival Cruise, after getting hit by ransomware twice in one year, exposes data of guests, employees, and crew in an email hack. [BleepingComputer] As if cruise industry was not awful enough...
- 15 June 2021 - European Union's highest court, European Court of Justice rules that Facebook may be taken to court by any member state's privacy watchdog, not just Ireland's where it's European arm is incorporated.[The Associated Press]
- 14 June 2021 - Irish government is expected to unveil new laws criminalising refusal to provide a password when executing a search warrant. Exercising your human right to privacy may result in up to 5 years in prison.
It is not clear yet whether Irish government understand that hardened criminals will rather take 5 years over a more serious conviction and only victims of this will be law abiding citizens. [RTE.ie] - 14 June 2021 - Reports suggests that open source end-to-end encrypted Matrix protocol has become the backbone of French goverments's instant communications network, [WIRED]
- 11 June 2021 - Volkswagen discloses a data breach impacting 3.6 million customers' records in North America, including 90 thousand customers' sensitive financial records. [Reuters]
- 10 June 2021 - US DOJ shuts down the largest market trading in stolen login credentials. [BleepingComputer]
- 6 June 2021 - Apple pays out millions after its repair tech posted customer's explicit photos online (in 2016, no less). [The Telegraph]
- 6 June 2021 - Doctors in UK rally against government's plan to sell health data to third parties through NHS Digital. Opt out instructions. [The Guardian]
- 4 June 2021 - Germany ponders use of state-sponsored malware against anyone, wanting to deputise service providers to serve their customers malware, even when they're not suspected of a crime. [EURACTIV]
- 31 May 2021 - Privacy-promoting non-profit None of Your Business (NOYB) unleashes a wave of 500 complaint against websites which do not comply with GDPR in regards to how they present their cookie banners. [NOYB]
- 1 June 2021 - A Facebook funded study finds that new iOS privacy controls are bad for you. 😲 [University of Florida via PocketNow]
- 30 May 2021 - Court documents show that Google intentionally hid privacy controls behind dark patterns. [AndroidPolice]
- 25 May 2021 - European Court of Human Rights rules against UK's spy agency GCHQ in a lawsuit based on Edward Snowden leaks. ECHR says that GCHQ must implement 'meaningful safeguards' to protect the individuals who are not subject to its investigations. [The Guardian]
- 24 May 2021 - A German court rules that the encrypted email provider must monitor the email of two users involved in a blackmail case. [Cyberscoop]