Security News
Amazon will pay $30 million in fines to settle allegations of privacy violations related to the operation of its Ring video doorbell and Alexa virtual assistant services. According to a proposed order, Ring will have to pay $5.8 million in refunds to consumers and will be barred from profiting from unlawfully obtained consumer videos.
Indiana, Iowa, and Tennessee all passed state privacy laws, bringing the total number of states with a privacy law up to eight. No private right of action in any of those, which means it's up to the states to enforce the laws.
Google has announced plans to officially flip the switch on its twice-delayed Privacy Sandbox initiatives as it slowly works its way to deprecate support for third-party cookies in Chrome browser. To that end, the search and advertising giant said it intends to phase out third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users globally in the first quarter of 2024.
A new-ish messaging service that claims to put users' privacy first has changed its tune - and the end-to-end encryption claims on its website - as well as pulling its app from both the Apple and Google app stores after being called out online. Converso - a comms app launched in September 2022 - billed itself as a "Next-generation messaging app that keeps your conversations completely private." This, according to the developer's website, included "Proprietary state-of-the-art end-to-end encryption technology," no storage of messages on servers, and "Absolutely no use of user data." It claimed it could stand up to the likes of Signal and WhatsApp in the security stakes.
Apple's App Store team prevented more than $2 billion in transactions tagged as potentially fraudulent and blocked almost 1.7 million app submissions for privacy, security, and content policy violations in 2022. The App Store team also protected Apple users from hundreds of thousands of unsafe apps last year, rejecting almost 400,000 apps for privacy violations such as trying to harvest the user's personal data without their consent or knowledge.
In brief Japanese automaker Toyota has admitted yet again to mishandling customer data - this time saying it exposed information on more than two million Japanese customers for the past decade, thanks to a misconfigured cloud environment. The exposed data belongs to almost the entire Japanese customer base that had signed up for Toyota's T-Connect driver assist product, and users of the G-Link service - a similar product for Toyota's luxury subsidiary Lexus.
Google unveiled a slew of new privacy, safety, and security features today at its annual developer conference, Google I/O. The tech giant's latest initiatives are aimed at protecting its users from cyber threats, including phishing attacks and malicious websites, while providing more control and transparency over their personal data. Google has unveiled an update for its Android operating system that allows users to better control location sharing through apps installed on their devices.
A large language model is an artificial intelligence algorithm that employs deep learning methodologies, and extensive data sets to comprehend, condense, create, and predict new content. An example of an LLM is ChatGPT, a model developed by OpenAI that uses advanced machine learning algorithms to generate human-like language output.
Japan's minister for digital transformation and digital reform, Tono Karo, has apologized after a government app breached citizens' privacy. Fujitsu Japan developed and operates the service, which preps PDF files in response to user requests and then despatches them to printers in convenience stores.
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