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Showing results for tags 'privacy'.
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This update was just released yesterday. Numerous Asus routers are supported. This was a feature that was also found and slowly being implemented into Tomato. Now it's built into the Merlin firmware by default. The great thing about this is that it enhances and improves security overall, and it far more secure than DNS over HTTPS. I strongly recommend making use of this feature. Read more about it here: https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin/wiki/DNS-Privacy Downloads: https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/download
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The Privacy Policy here on Lunarsoft has been updated. An addition that Lunarsoft makes use of Google Inc's ReCAPTCHA, Google Analytics, and Google Maps has been added to the Privacy Policy. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments, post them here.
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Apple's legal battle over encryption dominated headlines earlier this year, but another tech giant is fighting a quieter legal war over user privacy: Microsoft. It won a major victory last week, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit sided with the company, ruling that a U.S. warrant could not be used to force Microsoft to turn over email data stored in an Irish data center. The decision, which the Justice Department is considering appealing to the Supreme Court, could have major implications for tech companies who routinely move data around the world so it can be backed up or quickly accessed by users. The Washington Post talked with Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith about the case and the company's other privacy efforts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. View the full article
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spotify Spotify is now selling your information to advertisers
NewsBot posted a topic in Backpage News
If you're a Spotify user, your friends and family aren't the only ones who are able to check out your playlists. The popular streaming service is now the latest platform that is opening its data to targeted advertising. Everything from your age and gender, to the music genres you like to listen will be available to various third-party companies. Spotify is calling it programmatic buying and has already enabled it. Advertisers will have access to the 70 million people that use Spotify's free, ad-supported streaming across 59 countries. By viewing your song picks, these buyers will be able to look for specific users who might be the best matches for the products they're selling. View the full article -
Windows 10 breaches French law by collecting too much personal information from users and failing to secure it adequately, according to the French National Data Protection Commission (CNIL). Some of the privacy failings identified can be remedied by users willing to delve deep into the Windows 10 settings, but one of the commission's gripes is that better privacy should be the default setting, not one users must fight for. CNIL served Microsoft with a formal notice on June 30, giving it three months to comply with the law, but only made it public on Wednesday. The commission conducted seven tests of the data sent back to Microsoft by Windows 10 in April and June of this year. Among Microsoft's faux pas was the collection of data about all the apps downloaded and installed on a system, and the time spent on each one, a process CNIL said was both excessive and unnecessary. View the full article
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snapchat Snapchat may start spying on objects in your camera
NewsBot posted a topic in Backpage News
Snapchat has proven to be a great resource for people to connect all over the world through the power of their smartphone. However, a sizeable user base also brings with it a sizeable opportunity for advertising revenue, and that's exactly what the company appears to be promoting - just maybe not in the way you'd expect. The company has filed a patent for a system using object recognition to serve users sponsored filters. The technology outlined by the company would identify items in pictures, then offer users image overlays from related brands. It's essentially tailored advertising on a pretty unnecessary in-depth scale. Despite the application including details about the object-spying described above, its primary purpose is to offer a more general system of recognition-based photo filters. View the full article -
opera Opera browser sold to a Chinese consortium for $600 million
NewsBot posted a topic in Backpage News
After a $1.2 billion deal fell through, Opera has sold most of itself to a Chinese consortium for $600 million. The buyers, led by search and security firm Qihoo 360, are purchasing Opera's browser business, its privacy and performance apps, its tech licensing and, most importantly, its name. The Norwegian company will keep its consumer division, including Opera Apps & Games and Opera TV. The consumer arm has 560 workers, but the company hasn't said what will happen to its other 1,109 employees. The original deal, announced in February, reportedly failed to gain regulatory approval. While expressing disappointment that it was scrapped, Opera CEO Lars Boilesen says "we believe that the new deal is very good for Opera employees and Opera shareholders." The acquisition was approved by Opera's board, and the company now has 18 months to find a new name, according to Techcrunch. The company actually makes more of its $616 million in revenue from Opera TV and the other consumer division products that it's keeping in the deal. "For Opera shareholders we are selling approximately a quarter of the company for $600 million, which is an attractive price for this part of our business," Boilesen says. View the full article -
Web browser Maxthon has been caught sending detailed information from it users, such as their browsing history and other installed applications to the China based company that develops the software. Maxthon is a freeware web browser for Windows, OS X and Linux, developed by Chinese company Maxthon Ltd based in Beijing. It is also available on Windows Phone 8, iOS and Android platforms as Maxthon Mobile. It has an estimated worldwide market share of 1% and about 2-3% of all Chinese internet users browses using Maxthon. Polish security researchers from the company Exatel that the browser regularly sends a ZIP files to server in China. The ZIP file contains all kinds of data about the system of the user and the internet history. Information about the system includes the CPU, memory, the adblocker status and the startpage. Also the URL of all visited websites, Google searches and a list of installed application on the system including their version number is sent to the Chinese company. View the full article
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facebook Facebook will start tracking which stores you go to
NewsBot posted a topic in Backpage News
Facebook wants to show advertisers that their ads make you visit their bricks-and-mortar stores and buy their stuff. To do this, they’ll use phones’ location services to track whether people actually walk into the stores after seeing an ad. The company’s new Local Awareness ad features will be fascinating for businesses and depressing for the rest of us. Businesses can now include a map with their ad to show users where the closest store is in case they want that $12 dress right now. So far, so good. Then, Facebook’s Offline Conversions API will match in-store visit data (tracked using the phone’s location services) with Facebook advertising data. So, H&M won’t be able to see if you individually visited after its “store locator” sent you strong subliminal messages, but it will be able to match visits with the number of people who saw that ad in their feed and felt compelled to walk in. View the full article -
Facebook has a link problem. Earlier this week, a security researcher named Inti De Ceukelaire detailed a curious fact about how Facebook Messenger treats privately shared links. Through the right API call, De Ceukelaire was able to summon links shared by specific users in private messages. The links were collected by the Facebook crawler, where De Ceukelaire discovered they were easily accessible to anyone running a Facebook app. Those links could be anything from a popular news story to directions to an abortion clinic. As long as they’re shared in private messages, they’re logged in Facebook’s database, and accessible to API calls. It would be hard to exploit that bug at scale for a few different reasons. De Ceukelaire was only able to make the API call because he's registered as a Facebook developer, and if he started pulling those links en masse, Facebook would quickly catch on and pull his credentials. Still, the bug points to a number of lingering problems with the conflicting way web services treat URLs, and how those conflicts can put private information into public view. View the full article
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The on-going battle between Apple and the FBI has brought encryption and security to the fore once again. After remaining silent on the subject for some time, President Obama -- speaking at SXSW -- said that he was opposed the idea of encryption mechanism that are so strong it prevents governmental access. "If technologically it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there is no key, there's no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer, how do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?" he wondered aloud, his almost rhetorical question playing neatly on two of America's biggest fears. He suggested that security keys should be made available to third parties, saying "you cannot take an absolutist view" when it comes to balancing security and privacy. But Obama has a solution: backdoors. Obama avoided talking directly about the Apple/FBI case, but it hung heavy in the air nonetheless. So what is his solution to the issue of encryption standing in the way of government being able to access whatever it wants? The out-going president's answer to the problem is far from fleshed out, and far from being a solution that anyone in their right mind would find agreeable. Addressing the SXSW audience, he said: View the full article
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The past several years have done wonders for Facebook's once-murky public reputation. After a series of privacy-related controversies and a rocky debut in the stock market, the company embraced and quickly came to dominate the time we spend on mobile devices. More than a billion of us use its apps every day, and they have come to serve as a vital connection between family and friends. As a result, Facebook's stock increased by a third last year, and revenue was up 40 percent in the last quarter. Flush with cash, the company has invested heavily in philanthropic efforts — both through internet.org, the company's controversial effort to connect the globe, and through CEO Mark Zuckerberg's personal charities, which are set to give away billions of dollars. All of which has given the company a newly articulated sense of mission, which it promotes aggressively in all its public communications: to make the world more open and connected. Fascinating to learn, then, that the company has been selectively disconnecting the world for hours at a time. In a fascinating report in The Information, reporter Amir Efrati details the various steps Facebook is taking to prepare for the possibility that Google one day removes its apps from the Play Store for competitive reasons. View the full article
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The use of ad-blocking software is growing as Internet users try to deal with the swelling number of ads delivered programmatically and the pervasive tracking of their online behavior. This growth has set alarm bells ringing within the online advertising industry, with concerns that the use of ad blockers could damage publishers' online revenues. Just last week it emerged that two groups of publishers in France are considering a lawsuit against, Eyeo GmbH, the maker of AdBlockPlus. While behavioral advertising ideally makes advertising more relevant to viewers, some people find it "creepy"; data shows that last year's revelations of the National Security Administration's attempts to track citizens online has made them warier than ever. View the full article
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facebook Facebook to Use Web Browsing History For Ad Targeting
NewsBot posted a topic in Backpage News
Through its ubiquitous "like" buttons on publisher sites across the web, Facebook has long been able to watch the web surfing behavior of its 1.28 billion monthly users. Soon it will begin to use that information for ad targeting on Facebook. Facebook already enables retargeting to users who've previously visited specific websites and apps, which advertisers can turn on by affixing tracking software to their products. Additionally, ads can be retargeted to Facebook users on their desktop screens via FBX, the company's ad exchange, which a plethora of demand-side platforms like Turn and AdRoll are plugged into. But what Facebook is now enabling is far more expansive in terms how it uses data for ad targeting. In a move bound to stir up some controversy given the company's reach and scale, the social network will not be honoring the do-not-track setting on web browsers. A Facebook spokesman said that's "because currently there is no industry consensus." Social-media competitors Twitter and Pinterest do honor the setting. Google and Yahoo do not. Facebook will honor the settings to limit ad tracking on iOS and Android devices, however. View the full article -
Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, has been fending off criticism from privacy advocates because the desktop search tool in recent versions of the operating system also searches the Internet. That means if you're searching your desktop for a file or application, you might also see results from Amazon or other websites. One person who dislikes Canonical's search tool is Micah Lee, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who maintains the HTTPS Everywhere project and is CTO of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Lee set up a website called "Fix Ubuntu," which provides instructions for disabling the Internet search tool. "If you're an Ubuntu user and you're using the default settings, each time you start typing in Dash (to open an application or search for a file on your computer), your search terms get sent to a variety of third parties, some of which advertise to you," the website says. View the full article
