Security researchers fear neuralMatch system could be misused to spy on citizens
Apple will scan photo libraries stored on iPhones in the US for known images of child sexual abuse, the company says, drawing praise from child protection groups but crossing a line that privacy campaigners warn could have dangerous ramifications. The company will also examine the contents of end-to-end encrypted messages for the first time.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Finding raises questions for security services weeks after similar revelations about PM’s number
The private mobile number of Dominic Raab, the UK foreign secretary, has been online for at least 11 years, raising questions for the security services weeks after the prime minister’s number was also revealed to be accessible to anyone.
Raab’s number was discovered by a Guardian reader using a Google search. It appears to have been online since before he became an MP in 2010, and remained after he became foreign secretary and first secretary of state – de facto deputy prime minister – in 2019.
Continue reading...Privacy protection is latest effort by the company to cut down tracking of users by advertisers and other third parties
Apple’s new privacy feature designed to obscure a user’s web browsing from internet service providers and advertisers will not be available in China, Saudi Arabia or Belarus, the company has said.
It was one of a number of privacy protections Apple announced at its annual software developer conference on Monday, the latest in a years-long effort by the company to cut down on the tracking of its users by advertisers and other third parties.
Continue reading...You might be surprised how much Google’s email service – and others – know about you. Here’s how to set some boundaries
Most people are aware of the cookies that track them across the web, and the privacy-invading practices of Google search, but did you know Google’s email service, Gmail, collects large amounts of data too?
This was recently put into stark focus for iPhone users when Gmail published its app “privacy label” – a self-declared breakdown of the data it collects and shares with advertisers as part of a new stipulation on the Apple App Store.
Continue reading...Setting means iPhone users can stop advertisers following their digital lives – to the ire of Facebook
Users of iPhones can now prevent advertisers tracking them across their apps, after the release of the latest software update from Apple introduced the controversial feature despite the protests of Facebook and the advertising industry.
The update, iOS 14.5, includes a setting called “app tracking transparency”, which for the first time requires applications to ask for users’ consent before they are able to track their activity across other apps and websites.
Continue reading...Covid has given Peter Thiel’s secretive US tech company new opportunities to operate in Europe in ways some campaigners find worrying
The 24 March, 2020 will be remembered by some for the news that Prince Charles tested positive for Covid and was isolating in Scotland. In Athens it was memorable as the day the traffic went silent. Twenty-four hours into a hard lockdown, Greeks were acclimatising to a new reality in which they had to send an SMS to the government in order to leave the house. As well as millions of text messages, the Greek government faced extraordinary dilemmas. The European Union’s most vulnerable economy, its oldest population along with Italy, and one of its weakest health systems faced the first wave of a pandemic that overwhelmed richer countries with fewer pensioners and stronger health provision. The carnage in Italy loomed large across the Adriatic.
One Greek who did go into the office that day was Kyriakos Pierrakakis, the minister for digital transformation, whose signature was inked in blue on an agreement with the US technology company, Palantir. The deal, which would not be revealed to the public for another nine months, gave one of the world’s most controversial tech companies access to vast amounts of personal data while offering its software to help Greece weather the Covid storm. The zero-cost agreement was not registered on the public procurement system, neither did the Greek government carry out a data impact assessment – the mandated check to see whether an agreement might violate privacy laws.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Teleperformance, which employs 380,000 people, plans to use specialist webcams to watch staff
Thousands of staff at one of the world’s biggest call centre companies face being monitored by webcams to check whether they are eating, looking at their phones or leaving their desks while working from home, the Guardian has learned.
In a sign of potential battles ahead over the surveillance of remote staff after the pandemic, Teleperformance – which employs about 380,000 people in 34 countries and counts dozens of major UK companies and government departments among its clients – has told some staff that specialist webcams will be fitted to check for home-working “infractions”.
Continue reading...Is smartphone tracking a less intrusive reward for good behaviour or just a way to enrich the incarceration industry?
In 2018, William Frederick Keck III pleaded guilty in a court in Manassas, Virginia, to possession with intent to distribute cannabis. He served three months in prison, then began a three-year probation. He was required to wear a GPS ankle monitor before his trial and then to report for random drug tests after his release. Eventually, the state reduced his level of monitoring to scheduled meetings with his parole officer. Finally, after continued good behaviour, Keck’s parole officer moved him to Virginia’s lowest level of monitoring: an app on his smartphone.
Once a month, Keck would open up the Shadowtrack app and speak his answers to a series of questions so that a voice-recognition algorithm could confirm it was really him. He would then type out answers to several more questions – such as whether he had taken drugs – and the app would send his responses and location to his parole officer. Unless there was a problem, Keck would not have to interact with a human and the process could be completed during a TV ad break.
Continue reading...As platforms pivot towards greater encryption, analysts are rushing to finesse child abuse prevention technology
“Predators are often early adopters of technology,” says Sarah Smith, chief technology officer at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a UK child abuse hotline. “It’s an arms race, we have to be constantly horizon-scanning.”
Smith and her team, based in an unassuming office in Cambridge, are a key link in a chain of experts around the world developing and finessing technology that tracks down paedophiles and removes child abuse images found online.
Continue reading...Judge gives summary judgment in favour of royal over extracts of letter to estranged father, Thomas Markle
The Duchess of Sussex has won her high court privacy case against the Mail on Sunday, hailing her victory as a “comprehensive win” over the newspaper’s “illegal and dehumanising practices”.
After a two-year legal battle, a judge granted summary judgment in Meghan’s favour over the newspaper’s publication of extracts of a “personal and private” handwritten letter to her estranged father, Thomas Markle.
Continue reading...Race to build app for people to demonstrate Covid jab or a negative test, but rights groups worry about ‘identity checks’
Vaccine passports, which would allow people with immunity to Covid to prove they were at low risk of spreading the disease, are being investigated by companies and countries around the world. But the proposals have also raised fears among critics that they could underpin an oppressive digital ID system, and put sensitive medical records in the hands of authorities and employers.
Despite the name, a vaccine passport is not a piece of paper; instead, in the most developed versions of the idea, it is an app or similar system that can prove the bearer has been vaccinated, tested positive for Covid antibodies, or recently received a negative test. There would be no need to build and operate a privacy violating centralised database.
Continue reading...Nancy Pelosi’s office confirms laptop was stolen when Trump supporters, incited by the president, invaded the building
At least two computers were stolen from the Capitol when a violent mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the building on Wednesday – including one from the office of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi – raising grave information security concerns.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Buttrose mounts robust defence of broadcaster’s independence in response to questions about Four Corners’ episode Inside the Canberra Bubble
The ABC chair, Ita Buttrose, has accused the government of a pattern of behaviour which “smacks of political interference” in a robust defence of the public broadcaster’s independence, according to a draft of a letter responding to a barrage of Coalition complaints about the Four Corners program Inside the Canberra Bubble.
In the program broadcast last month, the journalists Louise Milligan and Lucy Carter investigated complaints about attorney general Christian Porter, including an alleged history of sexist and inappropriate behaviour towards women, and an affair the acting immigration minister, Alan Tudge, had with a female adviser in 2017.
Continue reading...EU science funding is being spent on developing new tools for policing and security. But who decides how far we need to submit to artificial intelligence?
Patrick Breyer didn’t expect to have to take the European commission to court. The softly spoken German MEP was startled when in July 2019 he read about a new technology to detect from facial “micro-expressions” when somebody is lying while answering questions.
Even more startling was that the EU was funding research into this virtual mindreader through a project called iBorderCtrl, for potential use in policing Europe’s borders. In the article that Breyer read, a reporter described taking a test on the border between Serbia and Hungary. She told the truth, but the AI border guard said she had lied.
Continue reading...With its iPhones, watches and forthcoming smart glasses, Apple’s gadgets are increasingly becoming extensions of our minds and bodies. It’s the big tech dream – but could it turn into a nightmare?
By Alex Hern
Illustration by Steven Gregor
At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Apple engineers embarked on a rare collaboration with Google. The goal was to build a system that could track individual interactions across an entire population, in an effort to get a head start on isolating potentially infectious carriers of a disease that, as the world was discovering, could be spread by asymptomatic patients.
Delivered at breakneck pace, the resulting exposure notification tool has yet to prove its worth. The NHS Covid-19 app uses it, as do others around the world. But lockdowns make interactions rare, limiting the tool’s usefulness, while in a country with uncontrolled spread, it isn’t powerful enough to keep the R number low. In the Goldilocks zone, when conditions are just right, it could save lives.
Continue reading...Journalists call for removal of clause that would ban footage disseminated ‘with intent to harm’ officers
A proposed bill in France that would make it illegal to disseminate photographs or videos identifying police and gendarmes “with intent to harm” is a danger to press freedom, critics have warned.
The measure comes amid growing concern about allegations of police violence in the country. It is outlined in draft global security legislation to be presented to the Assemblée Nationale next week.
Continue reading...As management seeks more oversight of workers away from the office, campaigners fight for privacy to be respected
For many, one of the silver linings of lockdown was the shift to remote working: a chance to avoid the crushing commute, supermarket meal deals and an overbearing boss breathing down your neck.
But as the Covid crisis continues, and more and more employers postpone or cancel plans for a return to the office, some managers are deploying increasing levels of surveillance in an attempt to recreate the oversight of the office at home.
Continue reading...Exclusive: proposed rewriting of data protection rules said to put vital cooperation in doubt
A radical “pro-tech” plan championed by Dominic Cummings to rewrite Britain’s data protection laws is endangering future cooperation with the EU worth billions to the British economy, Brussels has warned.
The government’s newly published national data strategy, promising a “transformation” long sought by Boris Johnson’s chief adviser and the former Vote Leave director, has sparked concern at a sensitive time with the continued flow of data between the UK and EU member states in question.
Continue reading...Survivors and victims’ group ‘outraged’ by suggested sum per person for email error in May
Survivors of institutional sexual and physical abuse in Northern Ireland have rejected compensation offered to them in response to a damaging leak that exposed more than 500 of their names.
The Survivors and Victims of Institutional Abuse (Savia) group said on Sunday it was “outraged” by the offer of £1,500 per person as recompense for their identities being revealed earlier this year.
Continue reading...Bishop from Togo among 1,400 individuals alerted by WhatsApp to malware attack
A prominent Catholic bishop and a priest in Togo have been told they were targeted by spyware made by the private surveillance firm NSO Group, in the first known case of its kind involving members of the clergy.
A joint investigation by the Guardian and the French newspaper Le Monde can reveal that Bishop Benoît Alowonou and five other critics of Togo’s repressive government were alerted by WhatsApp last year that their mobile phones had been targeted with the spying technology.
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