Tag Archives: privacy

Get ready to see more drones overhead, even after hours. The US Department of Transportation on Monday released proposed regulation that would, for the first time, allow routine drone flights above crowds and at night. It’s all part of an effort to “further integrate drones safely into the national airspace system,” according to a webpage …

Privacy concerns are far from over even as we move into the new year. Google is removing apps that collect users’ SMS and call log information from its Play store in the coming weeks, it said in a blog post Monday. The post serves as a reminder to developers of the search giant’s new policy to restrict access to SMS …

AT&T says it will no longer sell your location data to aggregation services. Lawmakers called on the FCC to investigate breach of privacy after Motherboard reported that mobile carriers, like T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T, provided phone location data to third-party trackers. Carriers offered location data for legitimate services, such as fraud prevention and emergency roadside assistance, but the information was frequently abused by …

Google shouldn’t have to remove links about European citizens from search results across the whole of the internet, just in the European Union. That’s the recommendation of a top legal advisor to the EU’s Court of Justice. EU Advocate General Maciej Szpunar released an opinion Thursday saying searches made outside the EU shouldn’t be affected by the so-called right to …

iPhones ($285 at Amazon) are a bit like cigarettes, in that they’re addictive (in a sense) and sometimes marketed to kids. In fact, Apple has been urged to address “phone addiction” among its youngest customers. In response, Apple vowed to introduce new controls and added Screen Time with iOS 12. With it, you can establish time limits for individual apps, set a …

You can expect security to be a big topic at CES 2019, with many products designed to protect networks and data. But at the individual user level, you should also be thinking about one very basic way information can be misappropriated — your computer screen. The low-tech hack of simply looking over someone’s shoulder at an airport, coffee shop or …

In case you missed it, smart home devices are vulnerable to hackers. Experts have been warning us for years that smart devices aren’t so smart when it comes to security, showing us how easily a car, a doll or a security camera could be hacked. And hackers have done their best to prove the cybersecurity experts right — from yelling …

Bigger, faster and, yes, more expensive computers are coming to CES 2019. A lot of that will be driven by Nvidia’s new laptop graphics cards, known (unofficially for now) as the RTX 20-series. There will also be plenty to see on the more modest end of the price spectrum, from Chromebooks to budget two-in-one hybrids.  For sheer numbers, you can’t …

Apple’s getting more government requests for data. The tech company is making it easier to see where and what kind of data is being demanded.  On Thursday, Apple released its biannual transparency report, which details how frequently governments and private parties request customer data. With more than 1.3 billion devices active around the world, governments are increasingly looking to Apple …

Facebook on Wednesday said it was necessary to grant Spotify and Netflix special access to users’ private messages to enable integration of messaging features. The social media giant said in a blog post that experimental features no longer offered required granting read/write access to the companies. The blog post comes a day after The New York Times reported that Facebook …