A phone company just lost 1.6 million records to a phone call
A phone company just lost 1.6 million records to a phone call

Have I Been Pwned logged the leaked records, and The Register reported the dump on 14 August. Jessica Lyons, its cybersecurity editor, wrote it. A ShinyHunters spokesperson told her the group broke in by voice-phishing a member of staff. There was no e…

New York City Lawmakers Push to ‘Ban the Scan’ at MSG

At a press conference outside Madison Square Garden, politicians, musicians, and privacy advocates argued for tighter restrictions on how public venues deploy biometric surveillance.

France’s under-15 social media ban is struck down two weeks before it starts
France’s under-15 social media ban is struck down two weeks before it starts

The decision lands about two weeks before the ban was due to start, Bloomberg reported. Platforms were to stop creating accounts for under-15s from 1 September. Parliament gave the law final approval on 21 July. The desk covered that final vote at the …

US courts will start publishing how often the government uses spyware

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts told TechCrunch that it will start disclosing how many times judges authorized the use of spyware to wiretap suspected criminals.

Flock Safety cuts data retention to seven days after dozens of police abuse cases
Flock Safety cuts data retention to seven days after dozens of police abuse cases

Garrett Langley, the company’s chief executive, set out the package in a post on Flock’s own blog on 13 August. It covers six areas. Privacy, accountability, data ownership, data security, data accuracy and transparency. Most of the Flock Safety privac…

Meta removed 756,000 Australian accounts. Its real ask is that Apple does the checking
Meta removed 756,000 Australian accounts. Its real ask is that Apple does the checking

Representatives of Meta, TikTok, Google and Snap give evidence to an Australian parliamentary inquiry on Friday, Reuters reported. Regulators and government officials appear too. Meta went first, and it went alone. On Wednesday it published its enforce…

Flock Has New Rules for Police Surveillance, but We Found Plenty of Loopholes

Flock cameras are getting a bunch of new rules, but a close inspection makes me uneasy.

Flock says its new tool will help identify police abuse, but hasn’t explained how it works

The surveillance company announced it’s making a tool called “Audit Assistance” mandatory for all customers, claiming it’s already helped catch abuse. But the company has yet to explain how the tool works in detail, raising questions about its effectiv…

The fight over Flock and other ALPRs
The fight over Flock and other ALPRs

There are over 120,000 of Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras installed all over the US. Flock’s cameras, and others like them, use AI to identify and track vehicles based on their license plate number, make, model, color, and other info, networked together to track vehicles and people’s movements throughout the day and across […]

Cloudflare and Trail of Bits now audit who Signal says you are talking to
Cloudflare and Trail of Bits now audit who Signal says you are talking to

Here is the problem, and it is easier to state than most people expect. End-to-end encryption scrambles a message so only the recipient can read it. That works perfectly, provided you were handed the recipient’s real key. The app fetches that key from …