Company behind app says no personal information is collected but experts warn of ‘how easily’ data can be hacked
Yudara Kularathne came up with the idea for an AI-driven app when a friend was worried about a bump on their penis.
Kularathne was then a consultant physician in Singapore in 2019, but he saw the potential for an app that could instantly identify a suspected sexually transmitted infection from a photo of male genitalia.
Continue reading...Exclusive: £10m needed for regulator charged with developing tools to thwart financial crime and protect consumers
Banks are under pressure to stump up millions of pounds in interim funding for the organisation that polices open banking, with regulators saying the new money is needed to prevent financial crime and protect consumers if things “go wrong”.
Large banks including NatWest, HSBC, Lloyds and Santander UK were among more than 40 City firms summoned by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) last week to discuss a cash injection into Open Banking Limited (OPL), the body that oversees innovation in this area.
Continue reading...Incident comes as data shows government sector breaches mostly caused by human error, not criminal acts
The finance department has accidentally shared confidential commercial information for the second time as new data reveals the number of human errors behind government data breaches.
The department has confirmed that last week it emailed 236 suppliers, and that the email included “embedded information with some third-party confidential information”.
Continue reading...Italy’s data protection body investigates claims police shared names and addresses with firm collecting penalties for TfL
The names and addresses of thousands of EU drivers were unlawfully accessed by Italian police and shared with the company that collects Ulez penalties on behalf of Transport for London (TfL), investigators believe.
The Italian data protection authority is investigating claims by Belgium’s government that an unnamed police department misused official powers to pass the personal details of Belgian drivers to Euro Parking Collections, which is employed by TfL to issue fines to enforce London’s low emission zone (Lez) and ultra-low emission zone.
Continue reading...Findings suggest Jordan is relying on cyberweapon to quash dissent and its use is ‘staggeringly widespread’
About three dozen journalists, lawyers and human rights workers in Jordan have been targeted by authorities using powerful spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group amid a broad crackdown on press freedoms and political participation, according to a report by the lobbying group Access Now.
The information suggests the Jordanian government has used the Israeli cyberweapon against members of civil society, including at least one American citizen living in Jordan, between 2019 and September 2023.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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”.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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
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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...Owner gives parliamentary inquiry no reason for fall over three years but says China’s government could not conduct surveillance on app
WeChat has said its user numbers in Australia have declined almost 30% in the past three years, amid questions being raised about foreign interference on the app.
Tencent-owned WeChat told a parliamentary committee examining foreign interference on social media that as of July 2023, the communications app favoured by Australia’s Chinese diaspora community had fewer than 500,000 daily active users in Australia. The company told the committee in 2020 that its user base was 690,000.
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