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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Apple: Proposed UK law is a ‘serious, direct threat’ to security, privacy

New UK government surveillance laws are so over-reaching that tech companies can’t possibly meet all of their requirements, according to Apple, which argues the measures will make the online world far less safe

Apple, WhatsApp, Meta all threaten to quit UK messaging

The UK Home Office is pushing proposals to extend the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) with a range of proposals that effectively require messaging providers such as Apple, WhatsApp, or Meta to install backdoors into their services. All three services are now threatening to withdraw messaging apps from the UK market if the changes move forward.

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