Security News

Gay dating app Grindr faces a fine of more than $10 million from Norwegian regulators for failing to get consent from users before sharing their personal information with advertising companies, in breach of stringent European Union privacy rules. The Norwegian data privacy watchdog said Tuesday that it notified Grindr LLC of its draft decision to issue a fine for 100 million Norwegian krone, equal to 10% of the U.S. company's global revenue.

Mozilla this week announced further improvements to user privacy in Firefox, through the isolation of network connections and caches, thus essentially cracking down on supercookies. Specifically, Firefox 85 is arriving with an updated network architecture, where network connections and caches are isolated to the website being visited.

Data privacy has become a top area of responsibility for security professionals, and 34% of respondents to a survey indicated privacy is one of their core competencies and responsibilities. Ahead of Data Privacy Day on Jan. 28, Cisco's 2021 Data Privacy Benchmark Report also finds that 74% of more than 4,400 security professionals surveyed last summer from 25 countries saw a direct correlation between privacy investments and the ability to mitigate security losses.

Professionals union Prospect warned that the UK was at risk of 'sleepwalking into a world of surveillance' as more businesses turn to digital tools to keep tabs on remote workers. With employers no longer able to oversee work directly, some have turned to software as a means of keeping tabs on what their employees are up to.

Stealthbits unveiled its new Data Privacy Engine that connects user identities with the locations of their personal data to elevate data access governance. "Our new Data Privacy Engine is the first solution to proactively understand how data is connected to identities, enabling near-instantaneous answers to DSARs. This means our customers can address both data security and data privacy simultaneously, which we believe are two sides of the same coin."

A report from NordVPN finds disagreement on which political leader does better on privacy issues, whether disinformation should be banned, and what the biggest cyberthreat is. VPN service provider NordVPN has released the results of a Politics and Digital Privacy Study conducted on US citizens, finding party line divisions on many issues, but general agreement on others, such as whether Big Tech should be liable for its use of personal data or whether a policy similar to the proposed EU Digital Services Act should be enacted in the US. The study surveyed 1,000 American adults and focused on questions about privacy issues and disinformation on the internet with the aim of determining opinions on who should regulate those issues in the American market.

The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo continues to grow rapidly as the company reached 102M daily search queries for the first time in January. DuckDuckGo is a search engine that builds its search index using its DuckDuckBot crawler, indexing WikiPedia, and through partners like Bing.

WhatsApp said on Friday that it wouldn't enforce its recently announced controversial data sharing policy update until May 15. The Facebook-owned company has since repeatedly clarified that the update does not expand its ability to share personal user chats or other profile information with Facebook and is instead simply providing further transparency about how user data is collected and shared when using the messaging app to interact with businesses.

This year's Consumer Electronics Show was hampered by the pandemic, but that didn't stop an expert panel from convening to award this year's dubious CES 2021 Worst in Show honors in the context of gadget privacy and security. The awards were sponsored by the Repair Association and named the worst products from CES 2021 in the categories of privacy, security, ability to repair and environmental impact.

We all know that our cell phones constantly give our location away to our mobile network operators; that's how they work. "Pretty Good Phone Privacy" protects both user identity and user location using the existing cellular networks.