OnePlus is mainly known as the little upstart that took on the big guns with the help of its solid, yet affordable, handsets. But, its in-house version of Android, dubbed OxygenOS, is once again threatening to dent its hard-fought for credibility.
The problem lies with the company's approach to data-sharing, which is problematic. As security researcher Chris Moore has repeatedly pointed out, the manufacturer's OxygenOS-based devices not only gather a ton of user data, but they also tie this info to individual devices, and user accounts in particular. Some of the data-gathering is pretty standard fare, including how often you unlock your phone.
Read moreTransport for London plans to make £322m by collecting Tube users' location data and potentially selling it to third parties. At the end of 2016, TfL ran a pilot which tracked the Wi-Fi signals from 5.6 million phones as people moved around the London Underground, even if they weren't connected to a Wi-Fi network.
TfL publicly stated that the purpose of the scheme was to use the aggregated, anonymised data "to better understand how people navigate the London Underground network, allowing TfL to improve the experience for customers". It is now in consultation about tracking passengers on a permanent basis.
Read moreMoscow is adding facial-recognition technology to its network of 170,000 surveillance cameras across the city in a move to identify criminals and boost security. Since 2012, CCTV recordings have been held for five days after they’re captured, with about 20 million hours of video stored at any one time.
"We soon found it impossible to process such volumes of data by police officers alone," said Artem Ermolaev, head of the department of information technology in Moscow. "We needed an artificial intelligence to help find what we are looking for." Moscow says the city’s centralized surveillance network is the world’s largest of its kind.
Read moreSome weeks ago, I saw an ad (sponsored post) on Instagram that surprised me. It was about a product I never googled, shared, liked, or talked about on any social network even in direct messages. I had a bad intuition: the only time this product came up was in a random chat with a couple of friends in a cafe.
And the only way for Instagram to know about this was to listen to my real life conversations with the microphone. Last week, I did an experiment to confirm this and the result is just as scary as you can imagine. I speak Spanish, French and English. I usually mix these three languages.
Read moreAt 9.24pm (and one second) on the night of Wednesday 18 December 2013, from the second arrondissement of Paris, I wrote “Hello!” to my first ever Tinder match. Since that day I’ve fired up the app 920 times and matched with 870 different people. I recall a few of them very well: the ones who either became lovers, friends or terrible first dates. I’ve forgotten all the others. But Tinder has not.
The dating app has 800 pages of information on me, and probably on you too if you are also one of its 50 million users. In March I asked Tinder to grant me access to my personal data. Every European citizen is allowed to do so under EU data protection law, yet very few actually do, according to Tinder.
Read moreIf you’ve seen the TV series "Person of Interest," then you might recall that during the opening narration from Season One, Harold Finch would say, “You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror but it sees everything.”
I was reminded of that when I saw a GIF that appears as if it could be a Chinese version of the show. It is a CCTV clip showing current surveillance in China. Thanks to artificial intelligence, China’s sadly named “Sky Net” system demonstrates just how creepy real-time surveillance can be.
Read moreThe U.S. National Security Agency conducted targeted surveillance over the past year against 106,000 foreigners suspected of being involved in terrorism and other crimes, using powers granted in a controversial section of law that’s set to expire at the end of this year.
The number of foreigners targeted under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act rose from 94,000 in fiscal year 2015, according to U.S. intelligence officials, who asked not to be identified discussing the information. The program lets agencies collect the content of emails and other communications from suspected foreign criminals operating outside the U.S.
Read moreFor the past year, Apple has touted a mathematical tool that it describes as a solution to a paradoxical problem: mining user data while simultaneously protecting user privacy.
That secret weapon is "differential privacy," a novel field of data science that focuses on carefully adding random noise to an individual user's information before it's uploaded to the cloud. That way, a company such as Apple's total dataset reveals meaningful results without any one person's secrets being spilled. But differential privacy isn't a simple toggle switch between total privacy and no-holds-barred invasiveness.
Read moreAn international group of cryptography experts has forced the US NSA to back down over two data encryption techniques it wanted set as global industry standards, reflecting deep mistrust among close US allies.
In interviews and emails, academic and industry experts from countries including Germany, Japan and Israel worried that the U.S. electronic spy agency was pushing the new techniques not because they were good encryption tools, but because it knew how to break them. The NSA has now agreed to drop all but the most powerful versions of the techniques - those least likely to be vulnerable to hacks - to address the concerns.
Read moreResearchers have devised malware that can jump airgaps by using the infrared capabilities of an infected network's surveillance cameras to transmit data to and from attackers. The malware prototype could be a crucial ingredient for attacks that target some of the world's most sensitive networks.
Militaries, energy producers, and other critical infrastructure providers frequently disconnect such networks from the Internet as a precaution. In the event malware is installed, there is no way for it to make contact with attacker-controlled servers that receive stolen data or issue new commands.
Read moreAxarhöfði 14,
110 Reykjavik, Iceland