It was a dark day in 2017 when Twitter announced it was shutting down Vine, the six-second video-looping social app. In less than four years, Vine became a hub for micro-video memes, creating the rise of a generation of young Vine stars with its potential for quick and quirky humor. As users consoled themselves with …
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Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition app being used by US law enforcement to identify suspects and other people, is reportedly eyeing global expansion. It wants to sell its services to law enforcement in 22 more countries, BuzzFeed News said Wednesday, citing a Clearview AI document that was reportedly part of a November 2019 presentation given to police in Miami. …
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Are you using a VPN? You should be, especially if you frequently connect to public Wi-Fi networks on your phone, tablet or laptop. There are free options out there, but I agree with ZDNet’s David Gewirtz that free VPNs are not a risk worth taking. Fortunately, a VPN doesn’t have to be expensive — at least if you take advantage …
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Google and Tinder have come under scrutiny in Europe for their privacy practices. The Irish Data Protection Commission has launched two separate probes into whether the companies are in breach of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the commission said on its website Tuesday. The investigation into Google will look specifically at the company’s handling of location data based …
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Facebook will create a cash fund of $550 million for its Illinois users who filed a lawsuit over its privacy practices, law firm Edelson PC said on Wednesday. The settlement came after Facebook was sued for collecting facial recognition data to use in tagging photos, which allegedly violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. Tagging someone in a photo on Facebook …
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Facebook, already dealing with criticism about misinformation and protection of user privacy, has a new problem to worry about: slipping profits. The social media giant, which makes most of its money from selling ads, on Wednesday beat Wall Street’s expectations for earnings and revenue in the fourth quarter. But for the full year, the company’s profit shrank due to rising …
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Seeing ads and then being tracked online has become the new normal when it comes to browsing the internet. A new service aims to shake up this web-surfing model, but not for free. Scroll launched on Tuesday and touts web browsing that’s “twice as fast” with no ads and “80% fewer trackers.” The service costs $4.99 a month and has …
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Apple released two minor updates to its iOS operating system Tuesday. iOS and iPadOS 13.3.1 aim to resolve privacy issues found in the December release of iOS and iPadOS 13.3, after researchers discovered that certain location tracking features couldn’t be disabled in the iPhone 11 and that security features were being bypassed in Screen Time. Addressing the location tracking problem, …
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There’s a growing consensus that it’s the browser’s job to protect our privacy on the web. But on Tuesday, a Google Chrome leader warned that trying to make that change too soon could actually hurt the web by driving developers to mobile apps instead. “At our scale, it’s not reasonable to move too fast, because it’s too destructive,” said Justin …
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A lawsuit is taking aim at Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition app being used by US law enforcement to identify suspects and other people. The app is under fire after a New York Times investigation into the software company earlier this week. The app identifies people by comparing photos to a database of images scraped from social media and …
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