Virginia Hughes reports: New laws in Maryland and Montana are the first in the nation to restrict law enforcement’s use of genetic genealogy, the DNA matching technique that in 2018 identified the Golden State Killer, in an effort to ensure the genetic privacy of the accused and their relatives. Beginning on Oct. 1, investigators working…
Category: Featured News
Facebook Backs Down from Forced WhatsApp Privacy Changes
From EPIC.org: WhatsApp previously threatened sanctions against users who would not accept the company’s new terms of use with weaker privacy protections, but backed down late Friday after a coalition of groups from around the world protested. Burcu Kilic, digital rights program director for Public Citizen, released the following statement in response: “Thank you for stopping what you…
INTERPOL unveils new global database to identify missing persons through family DNA
From INTERPOL: LYON, France: In 2004, Croatian police found a man’s body in the Adriatic Sea. The condition of the body, which rendered identification through fingerprints or facial recognition impossible, meant that – for more than a decade – it remained unidentified. Enter I-Familia, a groundbreaking new database officially launched this month that applies cutting-edge…
‘Apple is eating our lunch’: Google employees admit in lawsuit that the company made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private
Tyler Sonnemaker reports: Newly unredacted documents in a lawsuit against Google reveal that the company’s own executives and engineers knew just how difficult the company had made it for smartphone users to keep their location data private. Google continued collecting location data even when users turned off various location-sharing settings, made popular privacy settings harder…