privacy

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Treasury Considers ID.Me Alternatives Over Privacy Concerns

Andrew Orr ·

The Treasury Department is looking into ID.me alternatives for accessing the IRS website over privacy concerns.

CEO Blake Hall this week said that the company also used one-to-many technology, which compares selfies taken by users as part of the verification process against a larger database. The company said it maintained an internal database of selfies taken by users and compared new selfies against it using Amazon’s controversial Rekognition technology. As of January 25, 20.9 million users’ selfies had been verified against that database, the company said.

 

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Facebook Rolls Out End-to-End Encrypted Chats for Everyone

Andrew Orr ·

End-to-end encrypted chats are now available for all users of Facebook Messenger, the company announced. This includes group chats and calls.

Last year, we announced that we began testing end-to-end encryption for group chats, including voice and video calls. We’re excited to announce that this feature is available to everyone. Now you can choose to connect with your friends and family in a private and secure way.

These secure chats remain opt-in only, instead of encrypted by default like actual private messaging apps.

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ID.me CEO Admits Company Uses '1:Many' Facial Recognition

Andrew Orr ·

ID.me CEO Blake Hall wrote in a LinkedIn post that his company uses 1:many facial recognition. Cyber Scoop explains how this contradicts a press release saying ID.me does not use this technology. 1:many means the technology can identify people within mass databases of photos. It’s the opposite of the 1:1 face match proposed in the IRS + ID.me verification.

“We could disable the 1:many face search, but then lose a valuable fraud fighting tool. Or we could change our public stance on using 1:many face search,” an engineer wrote in a message posted to a company Slack channel on Tuesday. “But it seems we can’t keep doing one thing and saying another as that’s bound to land us in hot water.”

AirGuard Lets You Detect AirTags on Android Smartphones
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AirGuard Lets You Detect AirTags on Android Smartphones

Andrew Orr ·

Android owners, this one is for you. AirGuard lets you detect AirTags on Android so you won’t get secretly tracked like we’ve been hearing about in the news. You can download it from Google Play, F-Droid, or straight from the GitHub page linked below. From the page: “With AirGuard you get the anti-tracking protection you deserve! The app periodically scans your surroundings for potential tracking devices, like AirTags or other Find My devices. If a devices follows you, you will get a notification in less than an hour. With the app you can play a sound on AirTags and find it easily. Afterward, you can view at which locations the device has tracked you. If no one is trying to track you, the app will never bother you.“

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Google Topics Will Categorize Your Browsing for Advertising

Andrew Orr ·

Google Topics will track your browsing and divvy it up into 300 categories for advertising. It replaces Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).

When you hit upon a site that supports the Topics API for ad purposes, the browser will share three topics you are interested in — one for each of the three last weeks — selected randomly from your top five topics of each week. The site can then share this with its advertising partners to decide which ads to show you. Ideally, this would make for a more private method of deciding which ad to show you — and Google notes that it also provides users with far greater control and transparency than what’s currently the standard. Users will be able to review and remove topics from their lists — and turn off the entire Topics API, too.