Security News
A few weeks ago, Twitter told Clearview to stop collecting its data and to delete whatever it's got. Facebook has also demanded that Clearview stop scraping photos because the action violates its policies, and now Google and YouTube are likewise telling the audacious startup to stop violating their policies against data scraping.
Version 80 of the Chrome browser is out with some new features designed to save your security and your sanity. The first is the first-party site that you are visiting, which needs those cookies for things like logging you back in automatically.
The bug, which Google describes as a technical issue, was triggered when users requested a Google "Download your data" export. In the notification sent to the impacted users, Google reveals that those who used Takeout to download their data might have ended up with someone else's videos in their Google Photos backups.
On Monday, Google sent emails to certain Google Photos users alerting them of a problem that affected them in late November 2019, as described by 9to5Google. For some Google Photos users who turned to Google Takeout between November 21 and 25 to download their data, one or more of their videos were "Incorrectly exported to unrelated users' archives," meaning that other people were able to see them.
Ireland's Data Protection Commission is launching an investigation into how Google uses customer data for its location services after the privacy watchdog received numerous complaints from consumer rights organizations across the European Union. The watchdog announced Tuesday that it has initiated an investigation into how Google's Ireland subsidiary, Google Ireland Limited, processes its customer location data and if the company is following rules and guidelines in accordance with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation.
The study [PDF] shows that nearly all councils across the UK exposed data about visitors to their websites, which was then sold on to private companies. These elements enable users to be tracked around the web, scraping together whatever information it can, such as what websites and apps they're looking at, their location and their device.
During this time, some videos in Google Photos were incorrectly exported to unrelated users' archives. Conversely, being a two-way issue, affected users might notice any videos in their archive not belonging to them.
Irish regulators have launched separate inquiries into Google and dating app Tinder over how they process user data, in a new round of regulatory scrutiny aimed at tech companies. Ireland's Data Protection Commission said Tuesday that it decided to look into how Google handles location data after a number of consumer groups across the European Union filed complaints.
A bug in Google's Photo software caused potentially 100,000 or more netizens to have their personal videos exposed to complete strangers last Thanksgiving. The Chocolate Factory this week began notifying punters that a bug in its data-archiving tool Takeout was to blame for some accounts having their private videos shared with total strangers.
Google is potentially facing a massive privacy and GDPR row over Chrome sending per-installation ID numbers to the mothership. "This Chrome-Variations header will not contain any personally identifiable information, and will only describe the state of the installation of Chrome itself, including active variations, as well as server-side experiments that may affect the installation," Google explains in a paper describing Chrome capabilities.