Security News
In a preprint paper, "One Protocol to Rule Them All? On Securing Interoperable Messaging," University of Cambridge doctoral candidate Jenny Blessing and security engineering professor Ross Anderson observe that the DMA is now law in Europe and messaging gatekeepers will need to comply, though it won't be easy. "Designing a system capable of securely encrypting and decrypting messages and associated data across different service providers raises many thorny questions and practical implementation compromises," they say in their paper.
Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a long-running class-action lawsuit filed in 2018. The legal dispute sprang up in response to revelations that the social media giant allowed third-party apps such as those used by Cambridge Analytica to access users' personal information without their consent for political advertising.
Multiple Chrome browser extensions make use of a session token for Meta's Facebook that grants access to signed-in users' social network data in a way that violates the company's policies and leaves users open to potential privacy violations. Security researcher Zach Edwards last week noted that Brave had blocked a Chrome extension called L.O.C. out of concern it exposed the user's Facebook data to a third-party server without any notice or permission prompt.
Cambridge Quantum Computing announce the appointment of Prof. Stephen Clark as Head of Artificial Intelligence. Prior to DeepMind, Prof. Clark spent 10 years as a member of faculty at the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology, where he was Reader in Natural Language Processing.
A campaign to sue Facebook over lax privacy policies that allowed Cambridge Analytica to slurp almost a million people's personal data from the social networking website hopes to become a representative action in the High Court, its instigators said today. The campaign said in a statement: "In 2013 and 2014, thousands of people participated in the thisisyourdigitallife app on Facebook. Facebook allowed this app to harvest the data of the app users' friends without their friends' permission or knowledge, including Alvin Carpio, the representative claimant. By taking data without consent, it is alleged that Facebook failed to meet their legal obligations under the Data Protection Act 1998.".
A Cambridge post-graduate student has recreated the "Cyclometer", the decryption device devised by Polish mathematicians that informed Alan Turing's later code-breaking efforts. Turing famously devised the "Bombe", a machine that was capable of decrypting messages encoded by Nazi Germany's fiendish Enigma machines.
Australia's privacy watchdog announced legal action against Facebook Monday for alleged "Systematic failures" exposing more than 300,000 Australians to a data breach by Cambridge Analytica. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner said it had initiated proceedings against the tech giant and that Facebook committed "Serious and/or repeated interferences with privacy".
Delete the data, and don't do any of that again, the FTC told the data analytics company, which already filed for bankruptcy in 2018.
MIA: Checks on Voter Microtargeting and Nation-State Information OperationsThe U.S. Federal Trade Commission has sanctioned data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica for misusing Facebook users'...
US regulators concluded Friday that British consultancy Cambridge Analytica -- at the center of a massive scandal on hijacking of Facebook data -- deceived users of the social network about how it...