Hackers steal customer data from Europe’s largest parking app operator

Posted on December 26, 2023 by Admin

Owner of RingGo and ParkMobile says data including parts of credit card numbers taken in cyber-attack

Europe’s largest parking app operator has reported itself to information regulators in the EU and UK after hackers stole customer data.

EasyPark Group, the owner of brands including RingGo and ParkMobile, said customer names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses and parts of credit card numbers had been taken but said parking data had not been compromised in the cyber-attack.

Police to be able to run face recognition searches on 50m driving licence holders

Posted on December 20, 2023 by Admin

Exclusive: Privacy campaigners say clause in new criminal justice bill will put all UK drivers on ‘permanent police lineup’

The police will be able to run facial recognition searches on a database containing images of Britain’s 50 million driving licence holders under a law change being quietly introduced by the government.

Should the police wish to put a name to an image collected on CCTV, or shared on social media, the legislation would provide them with the powers to search driving licence records for a match.

Sainsbury’s boss defends decision to sell customers’ Nectar card data

Posted on December 13, 2023 by Admin

Supermarket says it protects personal data ‘incredibly carefully’ and move makes ads ‘more relevant’

The chief executive of Sainsbury’s has defended its decision to sell data on the shopping habits of his customers to TV and consumer goods manufacturers looking to target their advertising.

Simon Roberts has said the supermarket group protects personal data “incredibly carefully” and that its strategy had made adverts more “relevant” for shoppers.

Hundreds of millions of Australian identity checks may have been illegally conducted, Senate hears

Posted on October 30, 2023 by Admin

Albanese government is rushing through laws to underpin the ID verification service, say experts who have privacy concerns

Hundreds of millions of identity checks under the federal government’s ID verification service may have been illegally conducted, with the Albanese government rushing through legislation to underpin the service.

Identity verification services are used by government departments and businesses – such as credit card providers and power companies – to combat fraud and identity theft.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

Britain is ‘omni-surveillance’ society, watchdog warns

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Admin

Exclusive: Fraser Sampson says law is not keeping up with AI advances as police retain 3m images of innocent people

Britain is an “omni-surveillance” society with police forces in the “extraordinary” position of holding more than 3m custody photographs of innocent people more than a decade after being told to destroy them, the independent surveillance watchdog has said.

Fraser Sampson, who will end his term as the Home Office’s biometrics and surveillance commissioner this month, said there “isn’t much not being watched by somebody” in the UK and that the regulatory framework was “inconsistent, incomplete and in some areas incoherent”.

Californians will be able to delete all personal online data with first-in-US law

Posted on October 10, 2023 by Admin

Delete Act signed by governor Gavin Newsom strengthens existing regulations so users will be able to scrub info from a single page

In a victory for privacy advocates and consumers, the California governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that would enable residents to request that their personal information be deleted from the coffers of all the data brokers in the state.

The bill, SB 362, otherwise known as the Delete Act, was introduced in April 2023 by the state senator Josh Becker in an attempt to give Californians more control over their privacy. Californians already have a right to request their data be deleted under current state privacy laws, but it requires filing a request with each individual company.

Federal government could pay millions in compensation over asylum seeker data breach

Posted on September 16, 2023 by Admin

Breach, discovered by Guardian Australia, resulted in information being used to allegedly threaten some in detention

The Australian government may be liable for tens of millions of dollars in compensation to asylum seekers after it posted their personal details online while they were in immigration detention.

The mass data breach, discovered by Guardian Australia in 2014, resulted in information being used, in some cases, to allegedly threaten asylum seekers, or persecute and even jail their family members.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

TikTok fined €345m for breaking EU data law on children’s accounts

Posted on September 15, 2023 by Admin

Irish data regulator says platform put 13- to 17-year-old users’ accounts on default public setting, among other breaches

TikTok has been fined €345m (£296m) for breaking EU data law in its handling of children’s accounts, including failing to shield underage users’ content from public view.

The Irish data watchdog, which regulates TikTok across the EU, said the Chinese-owned video app had committed multiple breaches of GDPR rules.

‘Deeply disturbed’: names of 64 alleged child sex abuse victims mistakenly given to media in Queensland court blunder

Posted on September 7, 2023 by Admin

Exclusive: Authorities move to notify families after children’s names were provided in unredacted documents

Authorities are notifying the families of 64 alleged victims of an accused Queensland paedophile after their identities were mistakenly made available to journalists.

The state’s attorney general, Yvette D’Ath, apologised for the “breach of victims’ privacy” on Friday morning and announced an inquiry into the error.

Australia will not force adult websites to bring in age verification due to privacy and security concerns

Posted on August 30, 2023 by Admin

The eSafety commissioner is to work with industry on a new code to educate parents about how to access filtering software and limit children’s access

The federal government will not force adult websites to bring in age verification following concerns about privacy and the lack of maturity of the technology.

On Wednesday, the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, released the eSafety commissioner’s long-awaited roadmap for age verification for online pornographic material, which has been sitting with the government since March 2023.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

Customer data used for unwanted romantic contact, UK poll shows

Posted on August 21, 2023 by Admin

Almost one in three people aged 18-34 have been messaged by staff after giving personal details to a business

Almost one in three people aged 18-34 have received unwanted romantic contact after giving their personal information to a business, a UK poll has shown.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has called for recipients of such texts to come forward to help the regulator gather evidence of the impact of this phenomenon.

The ICO has an online form for people who want to report an experience of unwanted contact.

Australians increasingly concerned about online privacy after high-profile cybersecurity breaches

Posted on August 7, 2023 by Admin

After massive hacks at Optus and Medibank, survey from information commissioner finds three-quarters of people feel data breaches are among biggest risk to privacy

Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

Australians are more concerned than ever over the handling of their personal information and want tough laws to protect them after the Optus and Medibank cybersecurity breaches, a new study has found.

The latest Australian Community Attitudes to Privacy Survey, released on Tuesday by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), found three-quarters of Australians feel data breaches are one of the biggest risks to privacy they face. That is an increase of 13% since the survey was last conducted in early 2020.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

Kenya halts Worldcoin data collection over privacy and security concerns

Posted on August 3, 2023 by Admin

Issues raised include use of eye scans to prove ‘humanness’ and financial inducements to sign up

The Kenyan government has barred the eyeball-scanning Worldcoin cryptocurrency project from recruiting new customers as it investigates data privacy and security concerns.

Kenya’s interior ministry said the venture must stop collecting user data after raising a number of issues including: concerns over the secure storage of data that includes scans of a user’s iris; that offering crypto in exchange for data “borders on inducement”; inadequate information on cybersecurity safeguards; and placing large amounts of private data in the hands of a private business.

UK spy agencies want to relax ‘burdensome’ laws on AI data use

Posted on August 1, 2023 by Admin

GCHQ, MI6 and MI5 propose weakening safeguards that limit training of AI models with bulk personal datasets

The UK intelligence agencies are lobbying the government to weaken surveillance laws they argue place a “burdensome” limit on their ability to train artificial intelligence models with large amounts of personal data.

The proposals would make it easier for GCHQ, MI6 and MI5 to use certain types of data, by relaxing safeguards designed to protect people’s privacy and prevent the misuse of sensitive information.

HWL Ebsworth hack: Queensland says its files were taken after criminals release Victorian documents

Posted on July 14, 2023 by Admin

State’s chief information security officer says information from Victorian departments and agencies was accessed

Highly sensitive legal documents from the Victorian government have been published on the dark web by cybercriminals, with Queensland also confirming files from at least one of its departments are included in the breach.

The breach is connected to data that was stolen from the law firm HWL Ebsworth in April by a Russian-linked ransomware gang, known as ALPHV/Blackcat, and posted online.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

Senator says she has been ‘excluded’ from writing pamphlet – as it happened

Posted on July 6, 2023 by Admin

This blog is now closed.

Patricia Karvelas challenges Littleproud’s Covid reasoning behind the Murray-Darling Basin delays on ABC RN this morning.

“This isn’t a new problem … Your government was in power when a 2019 Productivity Commission report warned that there had been limited progress returning the water to the environment,” she says. “Why didn’t you change course?”

This is a very technical piece of legislation … The 450 is additional to the 2,750 gigalitres of water in the plan, the Productivity Commission looked at the 450 gigalitres, there’s only been 2 gigalitres recovered on the 450 …

Because the neutrality test on social and economic impact on rural communities have not been passed to get more water back out of it – that’s a test the Labor government put in place, that we adhere to that the states agreed to.

He [is] going down a path that’s divided the country and meant that the attention has been taken away from managing people’s cost-of-living crisis, and focused on trying to win a referendum in which he has overreached in conflating a voice with constitutional recognition.

Online safety bill: changes urged to allow access to social media data

Posted on June 19, 2023 by Admin

Campaigners say bill in ‘serious peril’ of passing without powers to make platforms more transparent

Online safety experts will struggle to sound the alarm about harmful content if landmark legislation does not allow independent researchers to access data from social media platforms, campaigners have warned.

The government is being urged to adopt amendments to the online safety bill enabling researchers to access platform data in order to monitor harmful material. Access would be overseen by Ofcom, the communications watchdog, and would protect user privacy.

EU countries accuse TfL debt collectors of breaching data protection laws over London penalty fines

Posted on June 18, 2023 by Admin

Belgium and Dutch vehicle licensing agency say citizens’ details obtained unlawfully to issue driving fines

Two EU countries have accused Transport for London’s debt collection agency of breaching data protection laws to obtain the names and addresses of citizens in order to issue fines for driving in the capital.

Motorists from across Europe have been hit with penalties, some totalling thousands of pounds, for driving in London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (Ulez). Penalty notices are being sent to foreign motorists who enter the capital without pre-registering their vehicle, and the Guardian has revealed hundreds of drivers have been fined despite driving emissions-compliant cars.

Twenty-four UK doctors in five years censured over medical record breaches

Posted on June 13, 2023 by Admin

GMC says cases were among 194 incidents of alleged violations of confidentiality between 2017 and 2022

Two-dozen doctors have been disciplined by the UK medical regulator in the last five years after accessing and using information from patients’ treatment records without good reason.

The General Medical Council (GMC) said it had struck off two of the 24 doctors it had sanctioned after finding that they had undertaken “inappropriate use” of medical records.

Roundup Newswires

Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network

Category Archives: Privacy

Hackers steal customer data from Europe’s largest parking app operator

Police to be able to run face recognition searches on 50m driving licence holders

Sainsbury’s boss defends decision to sell customers’ Nectar card data

Hundreds of millions of Australian identity checks may have been illegally conducted, Senate hears

Britain is ‘omni-surveillance’ society, watchdog warns

Californians will be able to delete all personal online data with first-in-US law

Federal government could pay millions in compensation over asylum seeker data breach

‘Deeply disturbed’: names of 64 alleged child sex abuse victims mistakenly given to media in Queensland court blunder

Australia will not force adult websites to bring in age verification due to privacy and security concerns

Australians increasingly concerned about online privacy after high-profile cybersecurity breaches

Kenya halts Worldcoin data collection over privacy and security concerns

UK spy agencies want to relax ‘burdensome’ laws on AI data use

HWL Ebsworth hack: Queensland says its files were taken after criminals release Victorian documents

Senator says she has been ‘excluded’ from writing pamphlet – as it happened

EU countries accuse TfL debt collectors of breaching data protection laws over London penalty fines

Twenty-four UK doctors in five years censured over medical record breaches