Alma Whitten, the director of privacy at Google, is stepping down from that role and leaves behind her a complicated legacy in regards to user privacy. Whitten has been the company’s top product and engineering privacy official since 2010 and was at the helm as the company navigated a number of serious privacy scandals and controversies.
The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), one of Britain’s top intelligence agencies, has admitted it sometimes emails passwords in plain text to those who apply for jobs on its site.It was revealed in the last week that those who apply for jobs through the GCHQ’s recruitment portal are emailed their password in plain text after filling out the forgotten password feature on the site.
With less than three full months gone in 2013, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft all have admitted publicly to serious security breaches, something that would have seemed like an elaborate practical joke just a couple of years ago. But the times and the climate have changed, and if you needed more evidence of these facts, it arrived last week in the form of the first Microsoft Transparency Report.
Apple has implemented a deadline for when it will reject apps that access devices’ unique device identifier numbers, or UDIDs. Apple has been phasing out the 40-character string of letters and numbers over the last year, yet according to a post on Apple’s Developers site yesterday, this appears to be the final word: Any new apps or app updates that access UDIDs will not be accepted beginning May 1.
Microsoft received more than 11,000 requests for user information or content data from law enforcement agencies in the United States last year and supplied some user content in more than 1,500 of those cases. Overall, the company received more than 70,000 requests from law enforcement agencies worldwide and gave up some user content in 2.2 percent of those cases.
The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday joined a chorus of privacy advocates supporting changes to a 1986 law that currently allows the government to review some emails without a warrant.
UPDATE*: The default “Wi-Fi Calling” feature on T-Mobile devices that lets milllions of Android users make phone calls over a wireless Internet connection contained a vulnerability that could have been exploited to perform man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks.
The Web browser is the primary portal through which the vast majority of connected users access and interact with the Internet. Each browser has its own security and privacy settings and those settings have an enormous impact on the nature of the relationship between users’ data and the services they encounter online. Google’s Chrome browser has extensive, easy to navigate privacy settings that let users manage everything from digital certificates to location tracking to “Do Not Track” requests. In the latest installment of Threatpost’s occasional how-to video series, we look into the ways we can manage Google Chrome privacy settings and security while navigating the web in the Chrome browser.
Google, which has been a favorite target of privacy advocates for the last few years, has taken another step that’s unlikely to endear the company to that crowd or Android users. The company has begun removing ad-blocking apps from the Google Play Android app market, apparently for violating the terms of service.
Google has agreed to pay a $7 million settlement to several dozen U.S. states as part of an agreement of charges that the company was collecting private user data from WiFi hotspots while its Street View cars were driving around taking photos in various locations. The controversy over Google’s data-gathering practices with its Street View cars has been going on for more than a year, since it was revealed that the cars were collecting information from private users’ WiFi routers.
Infosec Insider content is written by a trusted community of Threatpost cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
Sponsored Content is paid for by an advertiser. Sponsored content is written and edited by members of our sponsor community. This content creates an opportunity for a sponsor to provide insight and commentary from their point-of-view directly to the Threatpost audience. The Threatpost editorial team does not participate in the writing or editing of Sponsored Content.
