Security News
The astonishingly mild sanction was revealed in a Freedom-of-Information response after senior data protection specialist Jon Baines at London law firm Mishcon de Reya asked about reprimands made under the General Data Protection Regulation. Reprimands are a formal expression of the ICO's disapproval, issued to organisations that have broken data protection law.
Researchers analyzed the security of four popular smartwatches for children and found pre-installed downloaders, weak passwords, and unencrypted data transmissions. The analysis demonstrates that most of these devices arbitrarily collect and periodically transmit sensitive data to remote servers without the user knowing about it.
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The CMA's claims come in the wake of yesterday's call by the UK's data watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office, for Google and co to sort out the privacy risks posed by ads. In June the CMA consulted on initial commitments offered by Google and the feedback from third parties was... they needed a bit of work.
For the past couple of years, Apple has made plenty of claims that its browser is all about security. The problem is, like with so much of what they do, Apple forces the users into working with their apps the way they believe is best.
The report finds some improvements for parents and educators, including increased transparency around privacy policies that provide more information about the products that children and students are using. "The passage of modern, sensible technology laws like the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 and the California Consumer Privacy Act in 2019 requires companies to update their policies to meet the new standards, but we need a robust and comprehensive federal privacy law and new regulations to better protect kids, and we need the industry to step up and stop placing the burden on parents, educators, and families."
In the never-ending battle for privacy on mobile phones, I seem to be forever searching for the right combination of apps and services to lift Android to a more secure place. Recently the privacy-centric browser took yet another step forward, one that had me immediately set it as my default Android browser.
Mozilla has announced the availability of a new free and paid Premium service, called Firefox Relay. You can pay for a Premium account where you get more aliases and can even create a new email domain for the aliases.
Heads-up: The mail privacy protection introduced in iOS 15 doesn't apply to the Mail app on the Apple Watch. The idea is quite neat and simple: to shield you from annoying marketing tricks such as tracking pixels, you can ask Apple to fetch your remote email content first, and then relay it to to you indirectly, thus using Apple as a proxy for images and links in your messages.
South Korea's privacy watchdog leaked personal information relating to participants in a case that sought to probe Facebook's leak of personal information. "Recently, while handling a Facebook collective dispute mediation case, an accident occurred in which the personal information in the dispute mediation was leaked to other applicants. We deeply apologize to the victims and the public for the fact that such a leak occurred," wrote Yoon Jong-in of the Personal Information Protection Commission on Monday, as machine-translated from Korean.