Security News
Civil liberties activists are suing a company that provides facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies and private companies around the world, contending that Clearview AI illegally stockpiled data on 3 billion people without their knowledge or permission. The lawsuit says the company has built "The most dangerous" facial recognition database in the nation, has fielded requests from more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies and private companies, and has amassed a database nearly seven times larger than the FBI's.
SEE: TechRepublic Premium editorial calendar: IT policies, checklists, toolkits, and research for download. The proposition has ardent supporters and detractors on both sides of the online privacy debate, with some saying it was needed to fill loopholes in the landmark California Consumer Privacy Act and others bashing it for not going far enough or reinforcing dangerous practices. Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog, added in another statement that said "Prop 24 enshrines Californians' privacy rights and safeguards them from legislative assault, adds groundbreaking new protections for sensitive information like our race, sexual orientation and location, and creates a European-style privacy agency to protect our rights."
California's Proposition 24, aimed at improving the California Consumer Privacy Act, passed this week. I was very mixed on the proposition, but on the whole I supported it.
California voters have backed an initiative expanding a data privacy law criticized by rights watchdogs as having worrying "Loopholes" for firms such as Google and Facebook. The California Consumer Privacy Act become law at the start of this year, the toughest of its kind in the US. Like the European Data Protection Regulation, applied in the European Union since May 2018, the California law guarantees rights regarding control of online data.
The Fitbits on our wrists collect our health and fitness data; Apple promises privacy but lots of iPhone apps can still share our personal information; and who really knows what they're agreeing to when a website asks, "Do You Accept All Cookies?" Most people just click "OK" and hope for the best, says former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. "The amount of data we're giving up is unprecedented in human history," says Yang, who lives in New York but is helping lead the campaign for a data privacy initiative on California's Nov. 3 ballot.
As students head back to the classroom, the spate of ransomware attacks against schools is continuing. The latest is a strike against a California school district that closed down remote learning for 6,000 elementary school students, according to city officials.
A ransomware virus took down a California school district's computer system, forcing a shutdown of distance learning for about 6,000 elementary school students, an official said. The attack disabled the computer server and email service for the Newhall School District in Valencia, The Los Angeles Times reports.
The Southern California cities of Irvine, Hermosa Beach, Camarillo, Montebello, Glendora, Cypress, Orange, Stanton, and Torrance, as well as the Mojave Desert Air Quality Management District are partnering with OpenGov to drive staff productivity, increase accountability, and improve customer service and community engagement. "Southern California cities are leading when it comes to modernizing internal operations and customer service delivery through cloud software," says OpenGov Vice President Tim Melton.
A California university which is dedicated solely to public health research has paid a $1.14m ransom to a criminal gang in the hopes of regaining access to its data. The University of California San Francisco paid out in the apparently successful hope that the Netwalker group would send it a decryption utility for its illicitly encrypted files, which it referred to as "Data ... important to some of the academic work we pursue as a university serving the public good".
California voters will weigh in this November on whether to expand a landmark data privacy law, alter a decades-old law that limits property taxes on businesses and exempt ride-hail giants Uber and Lyft from a new state labor law. Ballot measures are often among the most expensive and high-profile issues before California voters each election year and tens of millions of dollars are likely to be spent on each of the major initiatives.