Security News
Video app TikTok said Saturday it will challenge in court a Trump administration crackdown on the popular Chinese-owned platform, which Washington accuses of being a national security threat. As tensions soar between the world's two biggest economies, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on August 6 giving Americans 45 days to stop doing business with TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance - effectively setting a deadline for a potential pressured sale of the app to a US company.
Microsoft has taken legal action to seize web domains being used to launch coronavirus-themed phishing attacks. "Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit first observed these criminals in December 2019, when they deployed a sophisticated, new phishing scheme designed to compromise Microsoft customer accounts," said the mega-corp in a blog post this week.
Facebook on Monday announced that it filed a lawsuit in Virginia against 12 domain names for their deceiving behavior. The 12 fraudulent domain names are registered by India-based proxy service Compsys Domain Solutions Private Ltd. and the social platform sued them for impersonating Facebook apps and services such as facebook-verify-inc.com, instagramhjack.com and videocall-whatsapp.com.
The U.S. citizens'-rights watchdog organization has filed suit in the Circuit Court of Cook County in Illinois against Clearview AI, on behalf of a number of organizations comprised of vulnerable communities-such as survivors of sexual assault or domestic violence and undocumented immigrants-for violating the the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. Clearview has been collecting what are called "Faceprints," or unique biometric identifiers similar to someone's fingerprint or DNA profile, and then selling them to "Private companies, police, federal agencies and wealthy individuals, allowing them to secretly track and target whomever they wished using face recognition technology," ACLU Staff Attorney Nathan Freed Wessler wrote in a blog post published Thursday.
Roberto Escobar's company has reportedly filed a $2.6 billion lawsuit against Apple for purportedly having lame-o security - security so bad, his address purportedly got leaked through FaceTime and has led to subsequent assassination attempts. According to TNW and TMZ, former accountant and co-founder of the Medellín drug cartel Roberto Escobar, brother to the now deceased drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, is claiming that his iPhone X nearly killed him.
Two schoolchildren have sued Google, alleging that it's illegally collecting their voiceprints, faceprints and other personally identifiable information. In order to use those apps, the kids had to speak into the laptop's audio recording device so Google could record their voices, and they had to look into the laptop's camera so Google could scan their faces.
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit the Department of Homeland Security over its use of facial recognition technology in airports, decrying the government's "Extraordinarily dangerous path" to normalize facial surveillance as well as its secrecy in making specific details of the plan public. "Our lawsuit seeks to make public the government's contracts with airlines, airports, and other entities pertaining to the use of face recognition at the airport and the border; policies and procedures concerning the acquisition, processing, and retention of our biometric information; and analyses of the effectiveness of facial recognition technology," Ashley Gorski, a state attorney for the ACLU, wrote in a blog post about the lawsuit published online Thursday.
Australia's privacy watchdog announced legal action against Facebook Monday for alleged "Systematic failures" exposing more than 300,000 Australians to a data breach by Cambridge Analytica. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner said it had initiated proceedings against the tech giant and that Facebook committed "Serious and/or repeated interferences with privacy".
Facebook announced on Thursday that it has filed a lawsuit against domain registrar Namecheap and its Whoisguard privacy protection service over its refusal to provide information on a series of domains that impersonated the social media company and its services. Facebook says it regularly looks for domain names and apps that infringe its trademarks and it has come across 45 domains that impersonated Facebook and its services, and which leveraged Whoisguard to disguise the registrant's information.
Facebook is suing the data analytics firm OneAudience for allegedly developing a malicious, social-media-profile-grabbing software development kit and then paying app developers to embed it in their apps. According to the complaint, OneAudience's malicious SDK swiped the data that Facebook users had agreed to share with the app - data that may have included their name, email address, the country where they logged in from, time zone, Facebook ID, and, sometimes, gender.