After another week On the tragic news and moral failure of the powerful, it’s good to know that you can at least depend on the little things, like the “privacy-focused” search engine. and the DuckDuckGo browser resist the temptation to sell out and help corporations survey their users. Oh, wait.
That’s right, a security researcher revealed this week that even DuckDuckGo, which markets itself as an “internet security company,” made an exception for its business partner, Microsoft, for its browser to block certain ad trackers on websites., sparking accusations of betraying its purported privacy ethos. The milk shake DuckDuckGo’s comes amid growing awareness of how the stakes of online surveillance are growing as signs suggest the US Supreme Court will overturn. Roe v. WadeAbortion Rights Protections: A new report this week from the Monitoring Technology Monitoring Project laid out all the the technological means available to law enforcement and private litigants to survey those wishing to have an abortionCandlestick Roe beaten down. And more than 40 members of Congress have called on Google stop tracking location data in Android before a potential Roe reverse.
In other privacy news, we looked at how the European Union General Data Protection Regulation failed to meaningfully limit Big Tech’s abuses of privacy four years after it passed. The Australian Digital Driver’s License Turns Out to be too easy to forge. China has been saber frenzy with accusations of American cyber espionage. We talked to the inventor of the browser’s “cookie” about how to handle cookie settings for privacy—And pop-ups related to those common cookies across websites. And we also interviewed the CEO of Protonmail, now renamed Proton, about ambitions to provide a range of privacy-focused services beyond email—Gladly there is no, ahem, oversight exception for its business partners.
But there’s so much more. As usual, we’ve rounded up all the news that we didn’t break or cover in depth this week. Click on the title to read the full story. And it’s safe out there.
Cybersecurity and privacy researcher Zach Edwards has discovered a glaring flaw in DuckDuckGo’s privacy-focused browser privacy practices: By examining data streams In browser data on the Facebook-owned Workplace.com website, Edwards noticed that tracking scripts placed by Microsoft on the site continued to communicate back to Microsoft-owned domains such as Bing and LinkedIn. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg responded to Edwards on Twitter, acknowledging that “our search agreement prevents us from downloading scripts owned by Microsoft” – acknowledging that the agreement is legal The work DuckDuckGo achieves with Microsoft includes creating an etching that allows Microsoft to track its users’ browsers. Weinberg added that DuckDuckGo is “working to change that.” (A company spokesperson reiterated in an email to WIRED Weinberg’s assertive that none of this applies to DuckDuckGo search, adding that both search and its browser offer more privacy protections than the competition.) certainly. It turns out that this kind of surveillance capitalism is pretty hard to get rid of.
Keeping the subject of capitalist surveillance, Twitter this week agreed to pay a $150 million fine after the Federal Trade Commission and the US Department of Justice accused it of selling user data it had collected under security trick. Twitter asked users to share email and phone numbers for security purposes, such as two-factor authentication and account recovery, but ended up selling the data to advertisers looking to target it. advertising to their users. That bait and switch violated an agreement Twitter made with the FTC in 2011 following previous privacy misconduct.
If the world doubts that China’s “re-education camps” for Muslim minorities in its Xinjiang region are actually prisons with fancy names, a big leak called Xinjiang Police Records will correct that illusion. The leak, made available by an unknown source to researcher Adrien Zenz, who in turn provided information to a global group of media outlets, including a huge collection of tens of thousands Internal files, manuals and even detailed photos reveal the life of one of the prisons in Xinjiang. Records reveal, for example, a shoot-to-kill order for any inmates who tried to escape the camp and instructions to shack inmates as they are transferred between different parts of the facility — hardly any operation of a “vocational school”, as China describes the camps to the world. It also includes photos of people detained in the campyoung people aged 15 and 73, often jailed for years without trial for simple crimes like studying Islamic texts.
In a replay of bizarre events from 2016, Google and UK government researchers revealed that a website published leaked documents from a group of politicians The UK’s pro-Brexit was actually created by hackers based in Russia. The website, titled Very English Coop d’Etat, describes its leaked email collection as coming from an influential group of hardline right-wing Brexit supporters, including former MI6 leader Richard Dearlove . But Google’s Threat Analysis Team told Reuters the site appeared to have been created by a group of Russian hackers it called Cold River. Former British intelligence chief Dearlove warned that his email leak should be interpreted as an operation of Russian influence, especially in light of the West’s current frosty ties with Russia over illegal aggression. lawfully and without reason to enter Ukraine.
An inadvertently unsealed subpoena, discovered by Forbes, revealed that an Iraqi man allegedly sought to assassinate former president George W. Bush in Dallas, going further than filming a video of Bush’s home in November, according to the subpoena, the FBI said it foiled the plot through the use of a secret informant and monitoring the assassin’s WhatsApp message metadata. The case shows how, despite claims by law enforcement agencies that end-to-end encryption can hinder their investigations, the FBI has managed to monitor encrypted apps like WhatsApp. and even hack their communications through the use of confidential informants.
