Over the last three years, Google has received a surge in geofence warrant requests — a type of request that allows police to gather information on devices in a certain region. The company has also been complying with keyword warrants, which gives police information on anyone who’s looked up specific phrases on the search engine. …

Your phone can tell a lot about you: where you’ve been, where your home and workplace are, and where your favorite places are. Federal agents are taking advantage of location data siphoned from advertisers through seemingly innocuous apps that you download for weather updates or cheap gas prices, and now a government watchdog is investigating the surveillance program.  In a …

Apple had a security vulnerability that could have allowed potential hackers to get complete access to a person’s iPhone — everything from viewing photos to monitoring activities in real time — without the victim ever needing to click on any suspicious links or download malware.  While most malware requires hackers to trick people in some way, like through a disguised …

Twitter faces a class-action lawsuit for providing advertisers access to people’s phone numbers without consent. The complaint, filed Monday in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, seeks $5,000 in damages for every person in the state affected by Twitter’s privacy misstep.  The lawsuit alleges that Twitter violated a Washington law against unauthorized procurement or sale …

For the most up-to-date news and information about the coronavirus pandemic, visit the WHO and CDC websites. Citizen, an app that lets you see unverified crime reports in your neighborhood, has often been used to advance false claims. One doozy: a tiger reportedly loose in Manhattan that turned out to be a raccoon. Now the company wants to help cities track …

For the most up-to-date news and information about the coronavirus pandemic, visit the WHO and CDC websites. With the coronavirus pandemic pushing schools online out of public health concerns, parents and teachers are turning to digital alternatives like apps to bridge the virtual gap. While kids can learn via these apps, hundreds of advertisers are learning about them, too.  Researchers …

Facebook filed a lawsuit Thursday against MobiBurn, alleging that apps using code written by the data monetization company harvested information about the social network’s users without permission. Last November, Facebook and Twitter launched investigations into two third-party software development kits (SDKs) that security researchers found were collecting data without consent. Making an app from scratch takes a lot of time, …

Geofence warrants are a concern among privacy advocates and lawmakers, and recently unsealed court documents show that Google engineers also have issues with the sweeping requests for location data.  On Friday, Arizona’s attorney general published internal emails from Google obtained as part of an ongoing lawsuit by the state on alleged consumer fraud and location data. Google had fought to keep …

 The Los Angeles city attorney on Wednesday announced a settlement with the Weather Channel over a lawsuit claiming the company’s app gathered millions of people’s location data without properly disclosing that the sensitive information was shared with advertisers.  The office considered the settlement a major privacy win, as it will now require The Weather Channel app to notify users that they …

Travelers heading to the US have many reasons to be cautious about their devices when it comes to privacy. A report released Thursday from the Department of Homeland Security provides even more cause for concern about how much data border patrol agents can pull from your phones and computers. In a Privacy Impact Assessment dated July 30, the DHS detailed its …