DoNotPay can perform a variety of tasks for you, like cancelling subscriptions, appealing parking tickets, and dealing with copyright protection. It has a new service called Photo Ninja that can help block facial recognition.
Photo Ninja uses a novel series of steganography, detection perturbation, visible overlay, and several other AI-based enhancement processes to shield your images from reverse image searches without compromising the look of your photo.
Cryptee is an online-only end-to-end encrypted storage platform, and recently added tagging to its Photos component.
First things first. All your tags and photos are encrypted and private. So we can’t see them. Now keep that in mind, and be prepared to be mind blown.
It’s 2021. We thought tagging should be as easy as typing out the tags in natural language. So we thought it would be amazing if you could tag your photos in Cryptee Photos the same way you tag your photos on Instagram or Twitter with hashtags.
Adweek’s Andrew Blustein joins Charlotte Henry to look at the dramatic impact the introduction of Ad Tracking Transparency (ATT) by Apple could have on the advertising industry.
The creator of The New Oil shared his website that gives people resources on privacy. But it’s not just a list of private tools to use. Instead the goal is to give people context and explain concepts like data breaches, why strong passwords matter, encryption, and more.
Most of us are not strangers to the concept of surveillance capitalism and targeted advertising. Most of us don’t particularly care, either. After all, who wouldn’t want relevant ads for movies or products that might actually appeal to you or improve your life? The thing is, most of us don’t understand the aggressive measures these companies go to to create those marketing profiles, or the devastating effects they can have on people.
The EFF wrote a detailed post about UID2, a proposed way to make it easier for advertisers to identify people via their email.
UID2s will be connected to people, not devices. That means an advertiser who collects UID2 from a website can link it to the UID2s it collects through apps, connected TVs, and connected vehicles belonging to the same person. That’s where the “unified” part of UID2 comes in: it’s supposed to make cross-device tracking as easy as cross-site tracking used to be.
But this will also create new incentives for sites, apps, and connected devices to ask users for their email addresses.
All the more reason to use Sign In with Apple wherever possible or disposable email services.
For Signal users in the United Kingdom, the company is releasing a new feature for beta testing that lets people send payments to each other using the cryptocurrency MobileCoin (MOB).
There’s a palpable difference in the feeling of what it’s like to communicate over Signal, knowing you’re not being watched or listened to, versus other communication platforms. I would like to get to a world where not only can you feel that when you talk to your therapist over Signal, but also when you pay your therapist for the session over Signal.
The limitation is because MobileCoin is listed for purchase on only one exchange, FTX, which doesn’t allow trades from U.S. residents. I’ve never heard of MobileCoin before but I’d say it’s something to keep an eye on.
U.S. government servers have been getting hacked left and right. In response, the NSA wants us to think that approval of domestic spying will solve the problem, despite suffering an egregious hack in 2016 where its zero-day exploits were stolen.
“We truly need to look at the ability for us to see ourselves and right now it’s difficult for us to see ourselves,” Nakasone testified on Thursday to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Adversaries like China and Russia “are operating with increased sophistication, scope [and] scale, including operations that can end “before a warrant can be issued,” he warned.
Google announced that it will stop Android apps from scanning the list of your other apps in Android 11. Why this behavior was accepted before is beyond me.
Google has another page that lists allowable use cases for Play Store apps querying your app list, including “device search, antivirus apps, file managers, and browsers.” The page adds that “apps that must discover any and all installed apps on the device, for awareness or interoperability purposes may have eligibility for the permission.”
Time to make a fake antivirus app which queries your list of apps to sell to other companies.
Andrew Orr joins host Kelly Guimont to discuss new App Tracking Transparency news, other updates, and the difference between security and privacy.
A report says that Snap Inc has developed a workaround for iOS 14’s App Tracking Transparency feature.
A new report says that Apple has been rejecting updates for certain apps, and the cause may be the use of an SDK from Adjust.
Collabio Spaces is an interesting new office suite that allows for document collaboration without needing external servers. Unfortunately it requires a subscription, but could be a useful tool for sensitive documents.
The P2P software lets multiple people co-edit a document locally — from a mobile device or desktop computer — without A) the risk of uploading sensitive information to the cloud (i.e. as you must if you’re using a shared document function of a service like Google Docs); or B) the tedium of emailing a text to multiple recipients and then having to collate and resolve changes manually, once all the contributions trickle back.
DuckDuckGo wrote on Tuesday that most browser tracking protection doesn’t stop tracking by default. There are multiple ways to track people besides third-party cookies, for example.
The issue is that once such trackers are loaded in your browser, they have a ton of ways to track you beyond just third-party cookies (e.g., by another form of cookies called first-party cookies, by your IP address, and much, much more).
Therefore, to really stop a cross-site tracker, the kind that tries to track your activity from site to site, you have to prevent it from actually loading in your browser in the first place.
Of course, the post is a plug for the DuckDuckGo browser extension, but the details behind tracking are good to know.
CNIL, France’s data regulator, is questioning Apple’s compliance with EU privacy rules over personalized advertising.
Andrew Orr joins host Kelly Guimont to discuss the abundance of news and updates this week, and explain what a hardware key is for your accounts.
Starting April 15, TikTok will make personalized ads mandatory whether you want them or not.
TikTok says it is “committed” to respecting the privacy of its users, according to a TikTok spokesperson. “We will continue to be transparent about our data privacy practices and help users understand their privacy choices on our Safety Center.”
People will still be able to control whether TikTok personalizes ads based on data pulled from other apps and websites.
Committed to respecting the privacy of its users. Eye roll.
A contractor with the U.S. military called The Ulysses Group wants to start selling vehicle location data to the military.
Ulysses can provide our clients with the ability to remotely geolocate vehicles in nearly every country except for North Korea and Cuba on a near real time basis. Currently, we can access over 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month.
Cloud provider pCloud released a report of the most invasive apps on iOS. No surprise but apps from Facebook are the worst.
Apple recently created a new webpage that lists all of its apps from A to X and shares information on its privacy labels in accordance with iOS 14.
Bryan Chaffin and Andrew Orr join host Kelly Guimont to talk about getting together in person in June, and the latest complaint against Apple for daring to offer user privacy.
Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces are the newest entries to the audio space, but they both do different things with your data. Matt Binder examined their privacy policies.
The two platforms’ approaches to data storage really speak to a major difference in their intended uses. It seems Twitter users will be able to Spaces for more permanent content that they can repurpose for other platforms and mediums; whereas Clubhouse rooms will live strictly in the moment.
I don’t want to spoil the article but it sounds like Clubhouse audio recordings are more ephemeral.
Lobby group France Digitale has filed a complaint against Apple, saying its own advertising is shown to users without their consent.
Hot on the heels of its big 3.0 update, the next announcement for Cryptee is support for DOCX uploading and editing. You can also export documents as DOCX, making Cryptee a viable cloud-based private alternative to Microsoft Word and Google Docs. However, there is an extra security bonus to Cryptee:
A little known fact about docx files is that, due to the fact that they support macros, and other ways to execute code in them, they are commonly used by malicious third parties to distribute and spread malware viruses. Cryptee does not run / execute macros while opening docx files, allowing you to open / edit / save DOCX files safely, without having to worry about your computer getting infected.
Google wrote a post updating its plans for its Privacy Sandbox project. Its goal is to make third-party cookies obsolete.
we are confident that with continued iteration and feedback, privacy-preserving and open-standard mechanisms like the Privacy Sandbox can sustain a healthy, ad-supported web in a way that will render third-party cookies obsolete.
Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers, and we have developed the tools to mitigate workarounds, we plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome.
I don’t know what the new “open standards” will be, but I’m definitely skeptical given the nature of Google’s advertising business. Will there be a new first-party tracking technique? Update: Here’s why the EFF thinks it’s a terrible idea.
