Tag: tracking

June 29, 2016

If you are a Facebook user and you haven’t guessed by now that it will sometimes suggest “friends” based on the fact that you happened to be at the same place at the same time, you should know that it […]

June 8, 2016

A recent story suggests Google is secretly recording your conversations and discussions. Although the story does have merit, it also has some problems. Google is recording voices; that’s entirely true. However, it does so for voice recognition only — and […]

June 3, 2016

In the process of creating and administering groups, users learn how to read data points, create a risk profile in their head, and watch for changes over time. In any profession, and in security specifically, it is the understanding and […]

May 30, 2016

Accusations that Facebook tracks non-users as they browse around the web have dogged it for years.Well, now we can stop calling them accusations thanks to an announcement on 26 May 2016 from the Social Network itself. Audience Network is Facebook’s […]

May 25, 2016

With password managers to take care of ch00sing c0MPl1c/\tEd p455WOrdz for us, and with two-factor authentication (2FA) to reduce the value of stolen or poorly-chosen passwords, you could argue that we no longer need to supplant passwords, because they’re easier […]

May 24, 2016

Really interesting research: “Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis,” by Steven Englehardt and Arvind Narayanan: “Web privacy measurement — observing websites and services to detect, characterize and quantify privacy-impacting behaviors — has repeatedly forced companies to improve their privacy […]

May 13, 2016

Mozilla is pressing the government to disclose a possible security vulnerability in its Firefox web browser that helped the FBI track down visitors to a child pornography site. The vulnerability is at the center of a case in the Western […]

May 12, 2016

Smartphones usually keep way more data about you than your communications provider. For example, the built in GPS-receiver provides more accurate location than tracking your mobile phone with cell tower triangulation. Smartphone “interrogations” are automated. It works like any other […]

May 11, 2016

Metadata represents the context generated by and/or surrounding all digital communications, or the traces left by digital data during its processing and digital existence. Since it may be construed as a digital halo that reflects the characteristics of the user […]

May 11, 2016

Social networks, online news outlets, media service providers, online shops — all of them offer high quality content, compared to the Internet of the past. To get to this quality, a large investment is required. Like all investments, there is […]

April 12, 2016

In the first months of 2016 a number of European countries have stated that Facebook is behaving irresponsible when it comes to users’ privacy. Facebook disagrees. In the beginning of February the French data protection authority proclaimed that Mark Zukerberg’s […]

April 7, 2016

If the denomination of acoustic fingerprinting does not fully reveal the core concept, then maybe defining this type of fingerprinting as the mark/pattern based on a digital summary extracted from a short audio signal (summary that includes identifying, recognizing and […]

March 14, 2016

Users who want to remain anonymous online often opt for using the Tor Browser, which hides their real IP address, but there are techniques that (more or less) malicious actors can used to identify them. Browser and system fingerprinting are […]

March 8, 2016

Verizon Wireless, in a settlement over its use of so-called supercookies to track mobile customers, will notify them about its targeted advertising practices and will obtain their permission before sharing personal identifiers with third parties. The company, in its settlement with […]

January 25, 2016

This week, 16 states got tired of waiting for the Feds to do something and introduced their own legislation that would provide new privacy protections for student data, employee social media accounts, location tracking, and more. Zcash, an untraceable Bitcoin […]

January 12, 2016

The Credential Manager in Windows is a relatively unknown feature, even though a lot of people are using it without being aware of its existence. Windows stores credentials in special folders that they call “vaults” to help users login to […]

December 2, 2015

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is drafting a policy to restrict the use without a warrant of cell-site simulator technology to snoop on the location and other information from mobile phones. The head of the IRS, John Koskinen, wrote in […]

November 17, 2015

As consumers use multiple devices through the day, and tracking cookies become increasingly less effective, the advertising industry is looking for new ways to track users’ online behavior. As they pursue that goal with single-minded dedication, it falls on government […]

November 17, 2015

A federal appeals court on Monday denied a long-shot attempt to halt the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit did not offer any explanation in its widely expected order, […]

November 11, 2015

Federal courts have long given the government leeway to survive and collect so-called “non-content” data—records of the senders and recipients of calls and emails, for instance, rather than contents of those communications. But an unlikely case involving Google may mean […]