UK's controversial online safety bill set to become law

Four years after it started life as a white paper, the UK government’s controversial Online Safety Bill has finally passed through Parliament and is set to become law in the coming weeks.

The  bill aims to keep websites and different types of internet-based services free of illegal and harmful material while defending freedom of expression. It applies to search engines; internet services that host user-generated content, such as social media platforms; online forums; some online games; and sites that publish or display pornographic content.

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New law could turn UK into a hacker's playground

It looks as if people are at last waking up to a second extraordinarily dangerous requirement buried within a UK government bill designed to promote the nation as a surveillance state. It means bureaucrats can delay or prevent distribution of essential software updates, making every computer user far less secure.

A poor law

This incredibly damaging limitation is just one of the many bad ideas buried in the UKs latest piece of shoddy tech regulation, the Investigatory Powers Act. What makes the law doubly dangerous is that in the online world, you are only ever as secure as your least secure friend, which means UK businesses will likely suffer by being flagged as running insecure versions of operating systems.

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As VR headset adoption grows, privacy issues could emerge

Head and hand motion data gathered from virtual reality (VR) headsets could be as effective at identifying individuals as fingerprints or face scans, research studies have shown, potentially compromising user privacy when interacting in immersive virtual environments.

Two recent studies by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, showed how data gathered by VR headsets could be used to identify individuals with a high level of accuracy, and potentially reveal a host of personal attributes, including height, weight, age, and even marital status, according to a Bloomberg report Thursday.

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Google’s “browse privately” is nothing more than a word play, lawyers say

Categories: News

Categories: Privacy

Tags: Google

Tags: Chrome

Tags: Incognito

Tags: private mode

Tags: fingerprinting

Tags: cookies

Tags: tracking

Private browsing is not what users expect it to be

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The post Google’s “browse privately” is nothing more than a word play, lawyers say appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

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Apple toughens up app security with API control

Apple is at war with device fingerprinting — the use of fragments of unique device-specific information to track users online. This fall, it will put in place yet another important limitation to prevent unauthorized use of this kind of tech.

Apple at WWDC 2023 announced a new initiative designed to make apps that do track users more obvious while giving users additional transparency into such use. Now it has told developers a little more about how this will work in practice.

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