Security News
GitHub to add non-essential cookies on marketing pages. "GitHub is introducing non-essential cookies on web pages that market our products to businesses," explains Olivia Holder, GitHub's Senior Privacy Counsel.
Those forces are tracking technologies and data privacy regulations. Three pharmacies in Sweden recently reported themselves to the Privacy Protection Authority for deploying the ubiquitous Facebook "Tracking pixel" on their site and sharing consumers' personal data the pixel collected with the world's largest social network.
Google on Friday pledged to update its location history system so that visits to medical clinics and similarly sensitive places are automatically deleted. Google keeps a log of its users whereabouts, via its Location History functionality, and provides some controls to delete all or part of those records, or switch it off.
Mozilla Firefox 102 was released today with a new privacy feature that strips parameters from URLs that are used to track you around the web. Numerous companies, including Facebook, Marketo, Olytics, and HubSpot, utilize custom URL query parameters to track clicks on links.
We've always known that phones-and the people carrying them-can be uniquely identified from their Bluetooth signatures, and that we need security techniques to prevent that. Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego proved in a study published May 24 that minute imperfections in phones caused during manufacturing create a unique Bluetooth beacon, one that establishes a digital signature or fingerprint distinct from any other device.
Mozilla says that all Firefox users will now be protected by default against cross-site tracking while browsing the Internet. "Total Cookie Protection is Firefox's strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site."
Researchers at the University of Hamburg in Germany have conducted a field experiment capturing hundreds of thousands of passersby's WiFi connection probe requests to determine the type of data transmitted without the device owners realizing it. WiFi probing is a standard process, part of the bilateral communication required between a smartphone and an access point to establish a connection.
Vodafone is piloting a new advertising ID system called TrustPid, which will work as a persistent user tracker at the mobile Internet Service Provider level. The mobile carrier plans to assign a fixed ID to each customer and associate all user activity with it.
US President Joe Biden has signed into law a bill that aims to improve how the federal government tracks and prosecutes cybercrime. The Better Cybercrime Metrics Act, which Biden signed late last week, requires the Department of Justice to work with the National Academy of Sciences to develop a taxonomy that law enforcement can use to categorize different types of cybercrime.
Meta's Facebook subsidiary has been collecting hashed personal data from students seeking US government financial aid, even from those without a Facebook account and those not logged into the student aid website, according to a research study published this week. News non-profit The Markup, working with Mozilla via its Rally data monitoring extension, found that the Meta pixel code has been gathering digital fingerprints representing the first name, last name, phone number, zip code, and email address of students filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, on the US Department of Education's StudentAid.