Security News
As we say every year, Data Privacy Day is more than just a 24-hour period when you try to keep safe online. It's a day to think about changes you can make in your digital life that will keep you safer today, and tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.
A German privacy watchdog says it has opened an investigation into clothing retailer H&M amid evidence that the Swedish retailer had committed "Massive data protection breaches" by spying on its customer service representatives in Germany. Hamburg's data protection commissioner said in a statement Monday that a hard drive containing about 60 gigabytes of data revealed that superiors at the site in Nuremberg kept "Detailed and systematic" records about employees' health, from bladder weakness to cancer, and about their private lives, such as family disputes or holiday experiences.
Patients and consumers deserve better access to personalized, actionable health care information to empower them to make better, more informed decisions - but it should not drive up health care costs or compromise the privacy of their personal health data, according to a poll of patients and consumers from Morning Consult and America's Health Insurance Plans. A strong majority of patients want their data and privacy protected more than ever, even if it means foregoing easier health data access.
It's time to patch your Cisco security solutions againCisco has released another batch of security updates and patches for a variety of its offerings, including many of its security solutions. Techniques and strategies to overcome Kubernetes security challengesFive security best practices for DevOps and development professionals managing Kubernetes deployments have been introduced by Portshift.
Unexpectedly, in December, Apple published a blog thanking Google for suggesting some changes to ITP which they'd implemented in Safari as part of December's iOS 13.3, and Safari for macOS 13.0.4 updates. Any site can issue cross-site requests, increasing the number of ITP strikes for an arbitrary domain and forcing it to be added to the user's ITP list.
An internet privacy firm says it was able to access private personal information of more than 30,000 medical marijuana patients, recreational pot customers or dispensary employees in several states. The privacy firm was searching for unsecured data online and says the database has now been secured.
Online services could help to prevent that and other types of harm that are befalling kids, but they aren't doing enough, the UK's data watchdog says. On Tuesday, the ICO published a code to ensure that online companies do just that - protect kids from harm, be it showing kids suicidal content, grooming by predators, illegal collection and profiteering off of children's data, or all the "Smart" toys and gadgets that enable children's locations to be tracked and for creeps to eavesdrop on them.
Verizon has slung out a new, privacy-focused search engine in an effort to win over customers who prefer not to have their browsing habits tracked by ad-slingers and the like. Three years ago, it bought Yahoo! and two years before that, AOL, in a ham-fisted effort to woo millennials away from Facebook and Google - which it later rebranded as Oath and then the Verizon Media Group.
Artificial intelligence - more specifically, the machine learning subset of AI - has a number of privacy problems. There is currently a fine line that AI developers must walk to create useful systems to benefit society and yet avoid violating privacy rights.
Apple is rolling out a new update to its iOS operating system that addresses the location privacy issue on iPhone 11 devices that was first detailed here last month. In December, KrebsOnSecurity pointed out the new iPhone 11 line queries the user's location even when all applications and system services are individually set never to request this data.