Recently both AT&T and T-Mobile have announced that they will be ending the sale of location data of their customers to third-party companies. This was hot on the heels of a report from Motherboard where the author, for $300, managed to get a bounty hunter to track down the location of a phone based on location data sold by carriers.
Sometimes when Android apps ask for permission, it can be a little scary and daunting if you’re not familiar with why they are asking for it. For example if a calculator app you downloaded asked for permissions to access your messages and photos, it doesn’t make sense and sounds downright suspicious, doesn’t it?
Before biometric security features were used for our smartphones, most phones relied on security features like a passcode, or in the case of Android, a pattern unlock feature. It also presented certain legal conundrums as to whether or not suspects could be forced by the police to unlock their devices (no, they can’t).
Recently there was an article published on Motherboard which revealed that for just $300, a bounty hunter was able to quickly and accurately obtain the location of a phone. This is apparently due to the location data sharing deals that carriers have with certain companies, in which the issue was that it wasn’t regulated properly as to who could use said data.
Update – Ring has since reached out to clarify that annotation on videos is only done for publicly shared Ring videos. They also denied the initial reports and stated that “Ring does not provide employees with access to livestreams of Ring devices.” Ring, the company known for their smart doorbells, is coming under fire recently where according to a report from The Intercept (via 9to5Google), it seems that the company […]
There are many reasons why users will want to change their DNS. A good reason is privacy where using another DNS could prevent your ISP from tracking what you are doing. Another reason is that it allows users to bypass certain blocks or restrictions that their ISP might have in place, like access to certain websites.
Apple’s stance on protecting its customers’ privacy is well-known and well-documented, with its company’s CEO Tim Cook publicly speaking up against others such as Facebook during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In fact in what seems like a very un-Apple like move, the company has bought an ad to troll its competitors ahead of CES 2019.
China seems to love their facial recognition technology. The country has deployed it for use to help identify and catch wanted criminals, and they’ve also used it to identify students who are not paying attention and might be napping in class. Now it looks like they plan to use the technology again to help curb public housing abuse.
As some of you might have heard by now, Epic has recently chosen to launch its own storefront where it will play host to their own games as well as games belonging to other developers. We imagine that the company is probably trying to take on the likes of Valve’s Steam platform, which at the moment is more or less the de facto store for PC gaming.
Over the past few years, it seems that governments have been requesting more and more data from tech companies such as Apple on their users. For the most part tech companies usually try to resist giving away information about their customers to protect their privacy, although from time to time, they do give in.