Suzanne Smalley reports: Texas’ attorney general is suing the insurance giant Allstate and its subsidiary Arity for allegedly illegally collecting, using and selling cell phone location and movement data belonging to more than 45 million Americans without their knowledge. Allstate harvested trillions of miles of that data from Americans’ cellphones through “secretly embedded” software Arity…
Category: Breaches
Hackers Claim To Have Compromised Data Broker Used By U.S. Government To Dodge Warrants
Over on TechDirt, Karl Bode writes: Gravy Analytics, the parent company of Venntel, is like many dodgy data brokers. The company gleans vast troves of sensitive U.S. behavior and location cellphone data, then generally sells access to that data to a long line of folks. Including the U.S. government, which has increasingly turned to buying…
The EU Fined Itself for Breaking Its Own Data Privacy Law
AJ Dellinger reports: The European Union has investigated itself and found…actual wrongdoing! For the first time ever, the EU has been found to have violated its own privacy rules established by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and will have to pay a fine, per a ruling handed down by the EU General Court. The victim…
Apple to pay $95 million to settle claims it used Siri to eavesdrop on customers
CBS News reports: Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a civil lawsuit accusing the privacy-minded company of deploying its virtual assistant Siri to eavesdrop on people using its iPhone and other trendy devices. The proposed settlement filed Tuesday in an Oakland, California, federal court would resolve a 5-year-old lawsuit revolving around allegations…