Security News
Britain's government on Tuesday backtracked on plans to give Chinese telecommunications company Huawei a limited role in the U.K.'s new high-speed mobile phone network in a decision with broad implications for relations between London and Beijing. The U.S. threatened to sever an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the UK because of concerns Huawei equipment could allow the Chinese government to infiltrate U.K. networks.
Privacy watchdogs in Britain and Australia have opened a joint investigation into facial recognition company Clearview AI over its use of personal data "Scraped" off social media platforms and other websites. Clearview AI Inc. came to attention after investigative reports detailed its practice of harvesting billions of photos from social media and other services to identify people.
Chinese telecoms giant Huawei urged Britain on Wednesday not to rush into taking any costly decision to phase out its equipment from the UK's 5G network because of US sanctions. Johnson's government allowed Huawei to roll out up to 35 percent of Britain's 5G network under the condition that it stays out of "Core" elements dealing with personal data.
A subset of Three UK users have received an SMS message warning them about text message-based spam - complete with a shortlink and textual urgings to click it and learn more. "They send an unsolicited out-of-the-blue SMS which asks you to 'click' on a link. When checked out in a sandboxed environment this goes to an insecure http-only page which warns of suspicious text messages and a video telling recipients not to tap on any links. Awesome!".
Facial-recognition technology used by British police forces does not rely on trawling the internet for random face photos to use as training data, an NEC manager told the courts. "Our biometric templates are unique to NEC and are not portable between vendors," said Paul Roberts, head of global facial recognition at NEC Global subsidiary Northgate Public Services.
A top judge told a barrister for the UK Information Commissioner's Office today that his legal arguments against police facial-recognition technology face "a great difficulty" as he wondered whether they were even relevant to the case. In plain English, Facenna was saying that South Wales Police's legal justification for deploying facial-recognition tech, as detailed yesterday, didn't comply with the Human Rights Act-guaranteed right to privacy - nor the Data Protection Act 2018 section, which states: "The processing of personal data for any of the law enforcement purposes is lawful only if and to the extent that it is based on law."
Harriet Harman MP, chair of Britain's Commons Human Rights Committee, has written to UK health secretary Matt Hancock seeking clarity on privacy aspects of the government's latest coronavirus contact-tracing app. "It is still crucial that people in the UK should be able to feel reassured that their data protection, privacy, and non-discrimination rights are protected in any contact tracing system," she wrote.
Automated facial recognition use by British police forces breaches human rights laws, according to lawyers for a man whose face was scanned by the creepycam tech in Cardiff. Squires is barrister for one Ed Bridges, who, backed by human rights pressure group Liberty, wants to overturn a judicial review ruling from 2019 which failed to halt facial recognition tech use against him by South Wales Police.
Cyber-threats taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic are evolving, and Google is seeing an increase in related phishing attempts in countries such as Brazil, India, and the UK. As the coronavirus crisis spreads worldwide, cyber-criminals and state-sponsored actors have adapted their attacks to leverage pandemic-related lures. Google says it has observed an increase in the number of scams targeting Aarogya Setu, an initiative where the government is trying to connect people across India with essential health services.
Some have claimed the Trump administration's concerns have more to do with losing the 5G arms race than anything else, but ostensibly its chief worries have been chalked up to security, with the US government claiming Huawei's 5G kit could be backdoored by Beijing. For its part, earlier this year, the UK's Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport labelled Huawei as a "High-risk" vendor over its perceived ties to the Chinese government, and issued strong new rules prohibiting carriers from using the firm's equipment within the core 5G network.