Douglas MacMillan and Aaron Schaffer report: For two years, New Orleans police secretly relied on facial recognition technology to scan city streets in search of suspects, a surveillance method without a known precedent in any major American city that may violate municipal guardrails around use of the technology, an investigation by The Washington Post has…
Cocospy stalkerware apps go offline after data breach
Zack Whittaker reports: A trio of phone surveillance apps, which was caught spying on millions of people’s phones earlier this year, has gone offline. Cocospy, Spyic, and Spyzie were three near-identical but differently branded stalkerware apps that allowed the person planting one of the apps on a target’s phone access to their personal data — including their messages, photos,…
Drugmaker Regeneron to acquire 23andMe out of bankruptcy
Daniel Gilbert reports: Regeneron Pharmaceuticals said Monday it will acquire 23andMe’s DNA testing business and most of its assets out of bankruptcy and pledged to continue offering the popular consumer service and adopt its privacy practices to safeguard customer data. The drugmaker said it will deploy the company’s trove of DNA to enhance its work…
Massachusetts Senate Committee Approves Robust Comprehensive Privacy Law
Seen at EPIC.org: The Senate members of the Joint Committee on Advanced IT, Cybsecurity, and the Internet have given a favorable report to a redrafted version of the Massachusetts Data Privacy Act (“MDPA”). If enacted, MDPA would be the strongest state privacy law in the nation. The Senate Committee bill, S.2516, uses many provisions from EPIC…