WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

There is almost no part of human biology that has remained untouched by digital measurement. HumanFirst, an organisation in San Francisco that maintains a catalogue of connected devices for remote patient monitoring, has identified 1,200 digital sensors that are tied to 8,000 physiological and behavioural measures.

The Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2020 highlights technologies that will significantly affect business, society and people over the next 5 to 10 years. This year's highlights 5 unique trends - find out what they are here.

Make no mistake, the knowledge of hacking is different from a hacker. A hacker is a person, not the skill. And the use of any knowledge is a personal choice and that choice isn’t universal. The same way some politicians are corrupt, some hackers are corrupt. The same way some politicians are good, some hackers are good also. You may be a Satoshi Nakamoto or an Albert Gonzalez, it is your choice. There is nothing wrong with the hacker knowledge. It is all about you. What You’ll Learn

While rich medical, behavioral, and socio-demographic data are key to modern data-driven research, their collection and use raise legitimate privacy concerns. Anonymizing datasets through de-identification and sampling before sharing them has been the main tool used to address those concerns. We here propose a generative copula-based method that can accurately estimate the likelihood of a specific person to be correctly re-identified, even in a heavily incomplete dataset. On 210 populations, our method obtains AUC scores for predicting individual uniqueness ranging from 0.84 to 0.97, with low false-discovery rate. Using our model, we find that 99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any dataset using 15 demographic attributes. Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization set forth by GDPR and seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the de-identification release-and-forget model. Anonymization has been the main means of addressing privacy concerns in sharing medical and socio-demographic data. Here, the authors estimate the likelihood that a specific person can be re-identified in heavily incomplete datasets, casting doubt on the adequacy of current anonymization practices.

Jumbo, an app for iOS and Android, launched in 2019 with the promise that it would cut through some of that confusion. The offer was simple: download the app, check a few boxes and it would automatically lock down your privacy settings on platforms including Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon. Rather than having to hunt down every individual preferences screen and decipher which settings were innocuous and which were merely deliberately phrased to sound innocuous, the app would do it for you.

In 2019, we saw phishing attacks reach new levels of creativity and sophistication.

A video explainer on the technology that’s changing the meaning of the human face.

The Dark Web is real, and your information might be for sale there. Here’s what your data is worth. The simple answer is this: about $45. This is how much, on average, a full set of information for a credit card is selling for, including a name, SSN, birth date, and CVV.

How to get off of people search sites like Pipl, Spokeo, and WhitePages.

How creepy is that smart speaker, that fitness tracker, those wireless headphones? We created this guide to help you shop for safe, secure connected products. Smart home gadgets, fitness trackers, toys and more, rated for their privacy & security.

We teamed up with researchers from New York University and the University of California, San Diego to find out just how effective basic account hygiene is at preventing hijacking. The year-long study, on wide-scale attacks and targeted attacks, was presented on Wednesday at a gathering of experts, policy makers, and users called The Web Conference.
Our research shows that simply adding a recovery phone number to your Google Account can block up to 100% of automated bots, 99% of bulk phishing attacks, and 66% of targeted attacks that occurred during our investigation.

Your web browsing history is the most lucrative piece of information that can be traded.

On average, in the US, using those three records, you could be correctly located in an “anonymized” database 81% of the time. Given 15 demographic attributes of someone living in Massachusetts, there’s a 99.98% chance you could find that person in any anonymized database.

Our tech columnist listened to four years of his Alexa archive, and discovered Amazon tracks us in more ways than we might want.

Our tech columnist offers some practical advice for fighting back against iOS apps hungry for your personal data.

The open source list of trackers that powers our browser extensions, Firefox’s private browsing mode, and other popular privacy tools can be found here along with a change log and notes.

We ran a privacy experiment to see how many hidden trackers are running from the apps on our iPhone. The tally is astounding. Apple says, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” Our privacy experiment showed 5,400 hidden app trackers guzzled our data — in a single week.

I lost north of $100,000 last Wednesday. It evaporated over a 24-hour time span in a “SIM port attack” that drained my Coinbase account. It has been four days since the incident…

Yes, we use data to make products more helpful for everyone. But we also protect your information.

Passwords. We all have lots of them these days. And yet we're told repeatedly to not reuse passwords and to make them strong. For most of us, that's an opposing set of directives. Unless you have some amazing memory, there's no way that we mere mortal

Have your accounts been leaked or stolen in a data breach? Find out at Firefox Monitor. Search our database and sign up for alerts.

False news spreads online faster, farther, and deeper than truth does — but it can be contained. Here’s how.

Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham has today (11 July) published a detailed update of her office’s investigation into the use of data analytics in political campaigns.

In May 2017 the Information Commissioner announced a formal investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes. The investigation is one of the largest of its kind and is ongoing. This page will be updated as and when developments arise.