Security News
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.
Any EU country can take legal action against companies like Facebook over cross-border violations of data privacy rules, not just the main regulator in charge of the company, a top court adviser said Wednesday. The preliminary opinion is part of a long-running legal battle between Facebook and Belgium's data protection authority over the company's use of cookies to track the behavior of internet users, even those who weren't members of the social network.
"I think the stars are better aligned than ever in the past," Keith Enright, Google's chief data privacy office, told a discussion Tuesday on trust and privacy. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, which has applied since May 2018, has largely contributed to making consumers aware of the issues related to the data that they submit to large digital platforms on a daily basis.
WhatsApp on Tuesday reassured users about privacy at the Facebook-owned messaging service as people flocked to rivals Telegram and Signal following a tweak to its terms. WhatsApp's new terms sparked criticism, as users outside Europe who do not accept the new conditions before February 8 will be cut off from the messaging app.
Data protection and compliance solutions provider HITRUST has announced the release of new Shared Responsibility Matrices for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Best known for the HITRUST CSF, the Texas-based company has worked with healthcare, technology and information security organizations to help organizations safeguard sensitive information and manage information risk.
The updated privacy policies, it argued, are instead related to the data collection of WhatsApp users who message businesses on the platform. According to WhatsApp, the policy update changes began rolling out in December.
Some states have enacted privacy laws, and the federal government has enacted industry-specific laws - HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and FCRA - but there is no single, homogeneous enforceable set of data privacy guidelines that all US companies are required to follow. With the emergence of stronger privacy laws abroad, the absence of national data privacy regulation in the US is making it harder for US companies to compete for global partners.