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18,000 Android apps with tens or hundreds of millions of installs on the Google Play Store have been found to violate Google's Play Store Advertising ID policy guidance by collecting persistent device identifiers such as serial numbers, IMEI, WiFi MAC addresses, SIM card serial numbers, and sending them to mobile advertising related domains alongside ad IDs.
This is a story of how, over six weeks, I cut them out of my own life and tried to prevent them from knowing about me or monetizing me in any way—not just by putting my iPhone in a drawer for a week or only buying local, but by really, truly blocking these companies from accessing me and vice versa. I wanted to find out how hard it would be—or if I could even do it—given that these tech giants dominate the internet in so many invisible ways that it’s hard to even know them all.
It’s not just logging off of Facebook; it’s logging off the countless websites that use Facebook to log in. It’s not just using DuckDuckGo instead of Google search; it’s abandoning my email, switching browsers, giving up a smartphone, and living life without mapping apps. It’s not just refusing to buy toilet paper on Amazon.com; it’s being blocked from reading giant swaths of the internet that are hosted on Amazon servers, giving up websites and apps that I didn’t previously know were connected to the biggest internet giant of them all.
for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and its other login accounts.
But this summer, Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand – literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits “may be” combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools.
The change is enabled by default for new Google accounts. Existing users were prompted to opt-in to the change this summer.
Google+ may be a punchline in the social-network world, but there’s something seriously wrong with it. For the second time in as many months, Google has announced that Google+ has been hit with another data leak, and this one is way worse than the last.
According to a blog post, some 52.5 million users are affected by this latest data breach, 100X more users than the 500,000 who were exposed during the last data leak. Like last time, affected users had their name, email address, occupation, and age exposed to third-party developers, regardless of whether their account was set to private. Google blames the leak on a bug and says it was fixed within a week of being introduced.
If you find always-listening smart devices creepy, but bought an Amazon Echo anyway, you’re not alone. A recent study from researchers at the University of Michigan found that people who own smart speakers are aware of the risks, but feel resigned to the idea that the erosion of privacy is now a fact of life.
Google has been accused of breaking promises to patients, after the company announced it would be moving a healthcare-focused subsidiary, DeepMind Health, into the main arm of the organisation.
The restructure, critics argue, breaks a pledge DeepMind made when it started working with the NHS that “data will never be connected to Google accounts or services”. The change has also resulted in the dismantling of an independent review board, created to oversee the company’s work with the healthcare sector, with Google arguing that the board was too focused on Britain to provide effective oversight for a newly global body.
Alphabet Inc’s Google gave details about its policies for third-party Gmail add-ons but stopped short of fully addressing questions from U.S. senators about developers who break its email-scanning rules.
Google has apologised after Android phone users noticed that the battery saver setting was remotely activated last week without their consent.
The battery saver affects how often apps update and work in the background.
"This was an internal experiment to test battery-saving features that was mistakenly rolled out to more users than intended," the company said on Reddit.
"We have now rolled battery saver settings back to default. Please configure to your liking. Sorry for the confusion."
Google owns major shares of 63,605 miles of submarine cables.
Google will be the sole owner of 10,433 miles of submarine cables when the Curie cable is completed in 2019.
Google holds partial ownership of 8.5% of submarine cables worldwide.
Google holds sole ownership of 1.4% of submarine cables worldwide.
A boom in submarine cable investments has been underway since 2016.
Content providers like Facebook and Amazon are increasingly building private cables to support their cloud services.
Alain Loriguet, maire LR de Thise dans le Doubs, justifie, dans Le Parisien, sa croisade personnelle. Pour démasquer ceux qui se risqueraient à frauder, l'édile a fait appel à Google. Grâce au service de photographies satellites du géant américain, Google Earth, il est parti à la chasse des piscines ou des abris de jardin non déclarés.
Une ONG américaine, Campaign for Accountability (CFA), a mené durant l’été un test grandeur nature pour le vérifier, rapporte le site Buzzfeed. Avec un budget de 35 dollars, un téléphone jetable, et un réseau privé virtuel (VPN), l’association a réussi à diffuser des publicités reprenant à l’identique des images ou des textes utilisés pour tenter d’influencer l’élection américaine de 2016.
Regardless of whether the project proceeds, Dragonfly is yet another clear warning that the ground has shifted for proponents of human rights in the digital age. A digitized world increasingly looks like a surveilled and censored world; options for engagement that do not compromise human rights in some form are dwindling. Counter-norms, providing models through which both companies and governments ensure “human rights by design,” are urgently required. We hope that it is not too late for Google to again push back against the global digital trends undermining human rights.
Le 30 août 2018, Google commençait la commercialisation de ses clés Titan. Ces clés promettent une sécurisation maximale en remplaçant le deuxième facteur de la double authentification, un processus que nous avons longuement détaillée dans un précédent article.
Seulement voilà : plusieurs experts ont interpellé Motherboard sur la fiabilité de ces clés dès le jour suivant le début des ventes. La raison principale : sa fabrication délocalisée en Chine.
When Jarek Duda invented an important new compression technique called asymmetric numeral systems (ANS) a few years ago, he wanted to make sure it would be available for anyone to use. So instead of seeking patents on the technique, he dedicated it to the public domain. Since 2014, Facebook, Apple, and Google have all created software based on Duda's breakthrough.
But now Google is seeking a patent that would give it broad rights over the use of ANS for video compression. And Duda, a computer scientist at Jagiellonian University in Poland, isn't happy about it.
L'action déposée vendredi par un Californien cherche à obtenir des dommages-intérêts non spécifiés ainsi qu'un statut de recours collectif pour représenter tous les utilisateurs américains d'iPhone ou d'Android qui ont désactivé l'historique de localisation afin que leurs mouvements ne soient pas enregistrés par Google.
"Google a expressément indiqué aux utilisateurs de son système d'exploitation et des applications que l'activation de certains paramètres empêcherait le suivi de géo-localisation des utilisateurs", peut-on lire dans le document. "Cette allégation était fausse."
Se basant sur un article de presse confirmé par des chercheurs universitaires, la requête accuse Google de violer la loi sur la protection de la vie privée. Google n'a pas voulu faire de commentaires.
Une enquête d’AP confirme que les applications Google continuent d’enregistrer la position des utilisateurs, à moins qu’ils ne désactivent aussi l’option « activité sur le Web et les applications ».
Google lance une application sobrement nommée Podcasts... pour écouter des podcasts.
Un chercheur a découvert une faiblesse dans les objets connectés de Google et certains de ses services : celle-ci permet de révéler avec une précision très élevée l'emplacement du foyer. Un patch est prévu.