Akshay Kulkarni reports: B.C.’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) has found two police departments improperly accessed the personal information of a Victoria man who previously filed freedom-of-information requests with them. Blogger Stephen Harrison, who regularly files FOI requests with the Victoria and Saanich police departments on Vancouver Island, uses the data for…
Suicide Hotlines Promise Anonymity. Dozens of Their Websites Send Sensitive Data to Facebook
The Markup found many sites tied to the national mental health crisis hotline transmitted information on visitors through the Meta Pixel By: Colin Lecher and Jon Keegan This article was copublished with STAT, a national publication that delivers trusted and authoritative journalism about health, medicine, and the life sciences. Sign up for its health tech…
US intelligence confirms it buys Americans’ personal data
Zack Whittaker reports: A newly declassified government report confirms for the first time that U.S. intelligence and spy agencies purchase vast amounts of commercially available information on Americans, including data from connected vehicles, web browsing data, and smartphones. By the U.S. government’s own admission, the data it purchases “clearly provides intelligence value,” but also “raises significant…
One of the Last Bastions of Digital Privacy Is Under Threat
Julia Angwin has an OpEd on the NY Times. She writes, in part: One of the last bastions of privacy are encrypted messaging programs such as Signal and WhatsApp. These apps, which employ a technology called end-to-end encryption, are designed so that even the app makers themselves cannot view their users’ messages. Texting on one of…