Personal Privacy News Roundup
Noteworthy Personal Privacy News From February 2024
Welcome to another issue of Secrets of Privacy where we discuss personal privacy related topics and provide practical tips to immediately boost your personal privacy.
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We received a lot of positive feedback on our inaugural roundup of monthly personal privacy news. So we’re gonna keep it going. These stories from February 2024 are intended to serve as case studies to help you prepare against current and future threats.
Feel free to drop in the comments any stories we overlooked.
Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’ (source)
Inside the Underground Site Where ‘Neural Networks’ Churn Out Fake IDs (source)
Mozilla (maker of Firefox) enters the anti-data broker war with new service that tries to wipe your data off the web (source)
Data broker Kochova allegedly selling de-anonymized info to face FTC lawsuit after all (source)
Privacy-centric hardware company Purism is seeking investors as they look to disrupt the market dominated by Apple, Microsoft and Google (source)
Notion acquires privacy-focused productivity platform Skiff (source)
Understanding Password Managers and How They Work
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For those who tried password managers in the past and gave up, please note that the tech has come a long way. Password managers are now more user friendly and accessible, making them a must have for protecting your online accounts. In this post we’ll walk you through the current password manager landscape so you can more easily integrate a password manager into your personal privacy stack.
Woman Got Cremation Ads in the Mail After Getting Chemotherapy (source)
Windows BitLocker broken by security researcher with $10 RaspBerry Pi in 43 seconds (source)
Fertility tracker Glow fixes bug that exposed users’ personal data (source)
A company tracked visits to 600 Planned Parenthood locations for anti-abortion ads, senator says (source)
Police Report Shows How a High School Deepfake Nightmare Unfolded (source)
I tasked a hacker with finding out about my life from the internet – the results shocked me (source)
First ever iOS trojan discovered — and it’s stealing facial recognition data to break into bank accounts (source)
AI-powered romantic chatbots are a privacy nightmare (source)
The Erosion of Financial Privacy (source)
Reddit sells training data to unnamed AI company ahead of IPO (source)
Your fingerprints can be recreated from the sounds made when you swipe on a touchscreen (source)
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held that data acquisition orders requiring the decryption of communications protected by E2EE are unlawful (source)
Schools Let AI Spy on Kids Who May Be Considering Suicide. But at What Cost? (source)
How your sensitive data can be sold after a data broker goes bankrupt (source)
Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools (source)
Disclaimer: None of the above is to be deemed legal advice of any kind.
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