Gmail 'safer than parliament's email system' says Tory MP

Google's email service - Gmail - is “more secure” than parliament's email system, the chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee has claimed.

Tom Tugendhat told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he has repeatedly been the focus of cyber attacks over the past three years.

Hackers have tried to access his account and sent emails impersonating him, he told the BBC.

The Tory MP believes China and Iran were behind some of these attempts.

“I was told by friends at GCHQ that I was better off sticking to Gmail, rather than using the parliamentary system, because it was more secure,” said Mr Tugendhat.

“Frankly, that tells you the level of security and the priority we're giving to democracy in the United Kingdom.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56733667

#google #gmail #uk #china #iran #cyberattack #tory #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Update on beta testing payments in Signal

As the world stands today, the future of transaction privacy does not look great. The existing landscape is dominated by traditional credit companies, who over the past decade have been steadily pushing their networks for increased access to user data. They (and their data customers) are on a track to getting SKU level data of every purchase everyone makes everywhere. There are other contenders, such as regional online payments networks (like Venmo in the US), but the data story there is similar.

This is not a future we are particularly excited about. At Signal, we want to help build a different kind of tech – where software is built for you rather than for your data – so these are trends that we watch warily.

https://signal.org/blog/update-on-beta-testing-payments/

#signal #privacy #messaging #cryptocurrency #payment #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

So I decided to download my Facebook data after learning I was a part of the 533m breach.

Clicked on a folder called “your_off_facebook_activity” and was unsurprised to learn that Facebook is following me all over the internet.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1381337384927830021.html

https://twitter.com/zamaan_qureshi/status/1381337384927830021

#fb #Facebook #why #stalker #spyware #thinkabout

Google to Start Censoring Telegram

Fake news or justifiable warning? You be the judge.

I saw a message today stating the “Google Play Store is now censoring certain pages on Telegram if you downloaded the app through them.” The message suggested a simple workaround to download the app directly from telegram.org/android.

👉🏼 Here’s the message in its entirety:

"Google Play Store is now censoring certain pages on Telegram if you downloaded the app through them.

To get around this simply download the Android app directly from Telegram themselves. Less censorship and more updates.

Before you delete the Google play store Telegram app, install the new one directly from Telegram which will send you a security code to your Telegram messages. Once you have the code from the old app and you enter it into the new one, you can then delete the Google play store version."

Having seen videos I consider important disappearing from YouTube recently I wouldn’t put it past Google to dupe the chattle into downloading a doctored version of Telegram in order to protect people stamp out free speech in order to suppress the fast-rising global freedom movement organizing on Telegram.

Whether or not the message I shared above was true or false is less important to me than maintaining free speech. And so I’d like to share a few resources I’ve learned about from being on Telegram which can help you do just that:

https://habd.as/post/google-start-censor-telegram/

#BigTech #censorship #dystopia #freedom #google #DeleteGoogle #youtube #telegram #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

How a WhatsApp status loophole is aiding cyberstalkers

Cyberstalkers typically like to collect as much information about their target as possible. They want to know where they are at any given moment; who they’re meeting; who they’re talking to; what their texts say; who they’re emailing; what they’re browsing for online. Knowledge is power, and having this level of power over someone is intoxicating, dangerous and profoundly unethical.

To combat the rise in cyberstalking behaviours, and to keep people safe, software developers are increasingly held to account for higher levels of privacy in their platforms and products. But the world of cyberstalking is a very grey one.

What one person regards as stalking, another may see as protecting a loved one. To this point, while Google has banned advertising for stalkerware on its app store, Google Play, countless tracking and monitoring apps get around this ban by claiming to help parents track and monitor their childrens’ online activity, location, messages and more.

https://traced.app/2021/04/13/whatsapp-status-loophole-is-aiding-cyberstalkers/

#whatsapp #DeleteWhatsapp #cyberstalkers #onlinestatus #tracker #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Strategic autonomy in danger: European Tech companies warn of lowering data protection levels in the EU.

The EU is highly respected internationally for its data protection laws such as the GDPR. Now an EC initiative could be a threat to Europe's strategic autonomy.

Today we are sending an open letter to the European Commission together with #Boxcryptor, #Cryptomator, mail.de, #Mailfence, #Praxonomy, and #Tresorit to draw attention to the dangers of undermining encryption and people's privacy. Mass surveillance will not stop terrorism or child sexual abuse.

Joint open letter for right to privacy

In the course of the initiative "Fighting child sexual abuse: detection, removal, and reporting of illegal content", the European Union plans to abolish the digital privacy of correspondence. In order to automatically detect illegal content, all private chat messages are to be screened in the future. This should also apply to content that has so far been protected with strong end-to-end encryption. If this initiative is implemented according to the current plan it would enormously damage our European ideals and the indisputable foundations of our democracy, namely freedom of expression and the protection of privacy (see EDRi letter). The initiative would also severely harm Europe’s strategic autonomy and thus EU-based companies.

Europe as a global technology leader is respected internationally for its high level of data protection, notably due to the exemplary effect of the GDPR. In an internationally very competitive market, European companies are in first position when it comes to data protection. The EU initiative could now endanger this unique selling point of European IT companies.

https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/european-autonomy-in-danger/

#tutanota #surveillance #gdpr #eu #encryption #privacy #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Brave Browser - Spyware Level: High

Brave Browser is a Chromium fork with many interesting features not found elsewhere, such as built-in Adblock and other extensions, fingerprinting protection, a cleaner Preferences menu compared to other Chrome forks, and the (opt-in) ability to automatically support (pay) the websites you visit. The developers describe it as "A browser with your interests at heart."[1] with the built-in privacy protections.

‼️ Spyware Level: High
Brave is self updating software, uses Google as the default search engine, has built-in telemetry, and even has an opt-out rss-like news feed similar to Firefox Pocket. These shouldn't be the things that come to mind if someone were to imagine a privacy oriented browser.

‼️ Whitelisting spyware from Facebook and Twitter
On its website, Brave claims that "Brave fights malware and prevents tracking, keeping your information safe and secure. It’s our top priority."[6]. Yet despite this claim, Brave actually disables its tracking protections for Facebook and Twitter's scripts that allow them to track people across the web.[5] Brave has been actively downplaying the role that JavaScript plays when tracking someone.

"Loading a script from an edge-cache does not track a user without third-party cookies or equivalent browser-local storage, which Brave always blocks and always will block. In other words, sending requests and receiving responses without cookies or other means of identifying users does not necessarily create a tracking threat."[7]

This couldn't be more far from the truth. Just because a website isn't able to store cookies, doesn't mean it can't uniquely identify you. Using JavaScript from Facebook and Twitter would be more than enough to track you and blocking cookies alone isn't going to stop that. Just as a quick point of reference to what information JavaScript can scrape, you might want to visit this website.

They later on added an option to the extension to disable all of the JavaScript, but this new feature seems to be nothing more than the JavaScript switch found in vanilla Chromium. They recently added an option here to block some of the scripts from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn after receiving pushback as a result of the controversy.

A quick note on the whitelisting trackers: This specific point on whitelisting trackers isn't making the case of Brave being spyware as much as it's making the case of Brave's privacy features being snake oil.

💡 https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/brave.html

#brave #browser #spyware #thinkabout #snakeoil
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Developers, it’s time for you to choose a side - Clean up the web!

Will you help rid the web of privacy-invading tracking or be complicit in it?

🚮 Remove third-party scripts from Google, Facebook, etc.
This includes Google Analytics (one of the most prevalent trackers in the world), YouTube videos, Facebook login widgets, etc.

These scripts enable people farmers like Google and Facebook to track people across the web as they go from site to site. If you embed them in your site, you’re complicit in enabling this tracking.

And yes, that absolutely includes fucking Google AMP.

https://cleanuptheweb.org/

👉🏼 Read as well: Nobody is flying to join Google’s FLoC - #Brave, #Vivaldi, #Edge, and #Mozilla are all out

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387492/google-floc-ad-tech-privacy-browsers-brave-vivaldi-edge-mozilla-chrome-safari

#cleanuptheweb #floc #google #DeleteGoogle #facebook #DeleteFacebook #tracking #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

This Company Monitors Prisoners In Xinjiang. It Won An “Innovation” Award At An Event Sponsored By Amazon

The Chinese government’s use of prisons and detention camps in Xinjiang is part of what the US and other countries have called a genocide.

With an Amazon logo behind him and luminaries from Shanghai’s booming venture capital scene in front of him, the executive onstage delivered his pitch. His company, Renwei Electronics, helps authorities in China track prisoners and detainees — alerting guards to their movements and even fitting them with heart rate monitors.

Renwei deploys its “smart prison” system in China’s Xinjiang region, where more than 1 million Muslim minorities have been locked up.

Yet this did not interfere with the warm welcome for Renwei at an event cohosted by an Amazon-backed “joint innovation center” in November. Event organizers gave Renwei’s executive a platform to deliver an “investor road show”–style speech to some of China’s most prestigious investors. And Renwei received a “product innovation award” recognizing it as one of six “outstanding entrepreneurial companies.”

Sent a detailed list of questions, Amazon declined to comment on the record. Renwei did not respond to a request for comment.

A growing list of multinational corporations are under pressure to move their supply chains away from Xinjiang, amid mounting evidence of mass detention and forced labor there, as part of what the US and other countries have recently called a genocide. Congress is considering a bill banning imports from Xinjiang tainted by forced labor, and US customs have already banned products made from tomatoes and cotton in the region, among other goods.

Amazon shut down its e-commerce business in China in 2019, but other parts of its sprawling empire still work with Chinese customers, including its highly profitable cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/amazon-xinjiang-prison-surveillance-award

#china #renwei #amazon #DeleteAmazon #xinjiang #prison #surveillance #thinkabout #why
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Nextdoor launches anti-racism notification to prevent discriminatory language

Nextdoor is introducing a new anti-racism notification, which asks users to reconsider posting content if the app thinks it may be offensive. As with its previous Kindness Reminder, if a user tries to post something with words or phrases Nextdoor thinks may be objectionable, it will give them the option to edit the post before it actually goes live. The users can, however, ignore the warning and post it anyway.

https://blog.nextdoor.com/2021/04/19/nextdoor-launches-anti-racism-notification-to-prevent-discriminatory-language/

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/19/22392304/nextdoor-anti-racism-notification-community-moderation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yLUWsZp5Ug

#nextdoor #racist #antiracism #notification #discriminatory #language #video #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Social Media ‘Likes’ Change the Way We Feel About Our Memories

Summary: Sharing our personal experiences on social media may negatively impact how we feel about our memories, especially if the post doesn’t get many likes, a new study reports.

Memories are often considered very personal and private. Yet, in the past few years, people have got used to notifications from social media or phone galleries telling them they have a “memory”.

These repackaged versions of the past affect not just what we remember but also the attachments we have with those memories. In a new study, we found social media has the potential to change how people feel about their memories.

Social media metrics such as Facebook “likes” can negatively impact how people feel about certain memories, especially if these memories are shared without getting many likes. Beyond this, the anticipation of social media judgements about the past can also impact on what memories people share and how.

With the aim of understanding the everyday presence of these automated memories, we drew upon detailed interviews and focus groups with around 60 social media users. In particular, we looked at how people use features such as Timehop, Facebook memories and Apple memories.

We asked participants about their experiences of being reminded of memories by these different features. While some found the features to be creepy and invasive, others found them a useful reminder of previous experiences they’d forgotten.

We also asked whether the number of likes a shared memory received had any impact on them. In some cases participants felt differently about their memories depending on the number of likes.

https://neurosciencenews.com/memory-social-media-18263/

#social #media #facebook #DeleteFacebook #likes #memories #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Forced unemployment and second-class status: The life of Google's data center contractors

Contractors love the good pay and engaging work in Google's data centers. They resent that Google and its staffing firm, Modis Engineering, make them quit every two years.

Shannon Wait felt a muscle pull in her shoulder as she knelt to lug a 50-pound battery into its rack, but she ignored the pain and kept going. She had 20 batteries to replace in the cavernous, 85-degree warehouse that day.

Hauling batteries is a major part of the job for Wait and hundreds of other workers like her at Google's data centers. They'd tried switching to automated machines during her two years working in the Berkeley County, South Carolina facility, but that stopped after only a few weeks when one of the machines pinned a co-worker to a wall.

Despite the heavy lifting, many of the workers in Google's 14 U.S. data centers at least start out enjoying the work. It's a tech job for people with no tech experience. It pays relatively well ($15 per hour for most contract workers). And while it's physically demanding, it's nothing like working at an Amazon fulfillment center or the local Walmart.

But Wait and other workers like her who keep the data centers running are not actually Google employees. While as many as half the workers in some data centers actually work for Google, make Google salaries and get all those famous Google perks, the other half don't. For data center contractors specifically, that difference can extend beyond second-tier social status to job insecurity and forced unemployment.

Protocol spoke with four contract and full-time Google employees in three of the 14 U.S. locations for this story, all of whom were granted anonymity for fear of losing their jobs (except for Wait, whose data center contract recently ended).

https://www.protocol.com/google-contractors-forced-unemployment

#google #DeleteGoogle #data #center #contractors #unemployment #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Internal Facebook email reveals intent to frame data scraping as ‘normalized, broad industry issue’

Updated: More scraping incidents are "expected" in the future.

An internal email accidentally leaked by Facebook to a journalist has revealed the firm's intentions to frame a recent data scraping incident as "normalized" and a "broad industry issue."

Facebook has recently been at the center of a data scraping controversy. Earlier this month, Hudson Rock researchers revealed that information belonging to roughly 533 million users had been posted online, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, and dates of birth.

The social media giant confirmed the leak of the "old" data, which had been scraped in 2019. A functionality issue in the platform's contact platform, now fixed, allowed the automatic data pillaging to take place.

The scraping and subsequent online posting of user data raised widespread criticism and on April 14, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) said it planned to launch an inquiry to ascertain if GDPR regulations and/or the Data Protection Act 2018 have been "infringed by Facebook."

Now, an internal email leaked to the media (Dutch article, translated) has potentially revealed how Facebook wishes to handle the blowback.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-internal-email-reveals-intent-to-frame-data-scraping-as-broad-industry-issue-and-normalized/

https://datanews.knack.be/ict/nieuws/interne-mail-toont-hoe-facebook-veiligheidsproblemen-wil-normaliseren/article-news-1724927.html

#facebook #DeleteFacebook #data #scraping #internal #email #thinkabout #why
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Tracking the WhatsApp habits of 5000 random Smartphones

In the previous blog post, we have seen that this is quite simple to hack the WhatsApp online status of a contact. A simple Online or last seen yesterday at 19:00 insight can be reverse engineered to leak phone habits at a couple of seconds accuracy.

‼️ There is an even more silly thing not mentioned yet: You can track any mobile phone ! So let’s play and scale to track 5000 random numbers.

Like previously, I am sharing the source code as a PROOF OF CONCEPT. You can jump straight to the end if you are more curious about the results than by the technical stuff I’m about to resume. We are reusing the previous code with Node.js, Puppeteer & Grafana.

https://jorislacance.fr/blog/2021/04/16/whatsapp-tracking-2

💡 Hack the WhatsApp status to track contacts
https://jorislacance.fr/blog/2020/04/01/whatsapp-tracking

💡 How a WhatsApp status loophole is aiding cyberstalkers
https://t.me/BlackBox_Archiv/2018

💡 Sudden New Warning Will Surprise Millions Of WhatsApp Users
https://t.me/BlackBox_Archiv/1987

💡 All the Numbers are US: Large-scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers (PDF)
https://t.me/BlackBox_Archiv/2042

#DeleteWhatsapp #user #tracking #whatsapp #thinkabout #change
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

India asks Twitter to take down some tweets critical of its COVID-19 handling

The Indian government asked social media platform Twitter (TWTR.N) to take down dozens of tweets, including some by local lawmakers, that were critical of India’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, as cases of COVID-19 again hit a world record.

Twitter has withheld some of the tweets after the legal request by the Indian government, a company spokeswoman told Reuters on Saturday.

The government made an emergency order to censor the tweets, Twitter disclosed on Lumen database, a Harvard University project.

In the government's legal request, dated April 23 and disclosed on Lumen, 21 tweets were mentioned. Among them were tweets from a lawmaker named Revnath Reddy, a minister in the state of West Bengal named Moloy Ghatak and a filmmaker named Avinash Das.

https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-asks-twitter-take-down-some-tweets-critical-its-covid-19-handling-2021-04-24/

💡 read this as well:
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/seize-property-of-those-spreading-rumours-up-cm/article34404518.ece

#india #twitter #covid #corona #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry

The information captured by our smartphones, as well as new speech- and facial-recognition technologies, can yield invaluable insights for mental health professionals.

As a physician, I need to figure out three things when a new patient walks into my office: what their life is typically like, what has changed that made them seek treatment and what I can do to help them. It’s a complex problem, and most fields of medicine approach it by taking measurements. If I were a cardiologist evaluating a patient’s chest pain, for instance, I would speak with the patient, but then I would listen to their heart and measure their pulse and blood pressure. I might order an electrocardiogram or a cardiac stress test, tools that weren’t available a century ago.

Because I’m a psychiatrist, however, I evaluate patients in precisely the same way that my predecessors did in 1920: I ask them to tell me what’s wrong, and while they’re talking I carefully observe their speech and behavior. But psychiatry has remained largely immune to measurement. At no point in the examination do I gather numerical data about the patient’s life or behavior, even though tools for taking such measurements already exist. In fact, you likely are carrying one around in your pocket right now.

In the last decade, an entire industry has been built to predict a person’s behavior based on their smartphone use and online activity. Because our search and social media history is digitized and time stamped, it represents a permanent breadcrumb trail of our thoughts and emotions. Tech companies and governments already use these data to monitor and commodify our likes and dislikes; soon psychiatrists might be able to use them to measure and evaluate our mental state.

Our smartphones measure our movements with accelerometers, our location with GPS and our social engagement with the number of calls and texts we send. These data have extraordinary potential for psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. Studies have shown that the words we use to express ourselves on Facebook and Twitter can predict the emergence of conditions like postpartum depression and psychosis. A person’s recent Google search history, it turns out, is a better predictor of suicide than their clinician’s most recent notes.

https://telegra.ph/The-Rise-of-Big-Data-Psychiatry-04-29

via www.wsj.com

#smartphones #BigData #psychiatry #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

The 11th Reason to Delete your Social Media Account: the Algorithm will Find You

TL;DR: you should delete your social media accounts, right now, even if you think they’re a net benefit in your life. I won’t judge you if you don’t, but this is not a joke, it’s not hypocritical to post a link to this on social media, and the fact that you probably came across it on social media doesn’t make the advice any less valuable.

After the introduction, there are five parts: the algorithm is real, the algorithm wants you online, the algorithm will find you, walk away from the algorithm, no, but seriously.

Introduction

A few years ago, Jaron Lanier wrote Ten Arguments to Delete your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Lanier’s book has the helpful feature of being completely unambiguous in its message (when, Jaron, when should I delete them? Oh). I ended up assigning it as optional reading for my undergraduate class, Bubbles. The Thanksgiving break means that students usually patch out that week and miss class, so I run an optional seminar instead. I’ve learned a huge amount from these little liminal-moment seminars each year, and some of them have led to real revisions in my own thinking, see, e.g., my views on University censorship when I was on Jim Rutt’s Currents podcast. In previous years, we read John Locke’s pluralistic Letter Concerning Toleration, but Lanier’s book has the advantage of not needing any coaching in close-reading.

https://simondedeo.com/?p=705

#delete #socialmedia #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

The Instagram ads Facebook won't show you

Companies like Facebook aren’t building technology for you, they’re building technology for your data. They collect everything they can from FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility into people and their lives.

This isn’t exactly a secret, but the full picture is hazy to most – dimly concealed within complex, opaquely-rendered systems and fine print designed to be scrolled past. The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible.

https://signal.org/blog/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see/

#signal #instagram #facebook #DeleteFacebook #ads #data #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Facebook shut down Signal’s ads because they exposed too much

Facebook has barred privacy-focused messaging app Signal from running a series of Instagram ads, which would have exposed just how much personal information the photo-sharing network – and its social media behemoth owner – has on individuals as they browse their timeline. Signal had intended to use Instagram’s own third-party advert tools to reveal some of the precise targeting that advertisers can buy access to.

There’s a general acknowledgement these days that advertisers can filter who, exactly, sees their commercials. That makes good business sense, after all: there’s no point in showing ads to people who are unlikely to be interested in your product.

However it’s likely that few mainstream consumers are aware of quite how much targeted information ad network providers like Facebook hold on them. Collated across multiple interactions online – with websites, apps, services, and more – they help build unexpectedly precise profiles about each user. Those profiles can then in turn be sold as visibility filters to more advertisers, so that they can further narrow down their campaigns to whoever they believe will be the most receptive audience.

https://www.slashgear.com/facebook-shut-down-signals-ads-because-they-exposed-too-much-04671574/

💡 read as well:
https://t.me/BlackBox_Archiv/2138

#signal #instagram #facebook #DeleteFacebook #ads #data #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

RocketReach and the creepy world of data harvesting

You’ve probably never heard of RocketReach. But I think you should, as it’s got me properly riled up.

I just want people to leave me alone. My job is hard enough as it is, without people sliding into my inbox 24/7.

- Hey, got time for a quick 15 minute chat about this random tool you’ll never use? NO

- Hi, I’d love to chat with you about a potential partnership with-GO AWAY.

- We really think your organisation could benefit from- JUST LEAVE ME ALONE.

- I noticed you haven’t replied to our previous emails; just checking you didn’t miss this. I DIDN’T MISS IT I’M DELIBERATELY IGNORING YOU.

It’s constant, and it’s draining. I don’t know who out there is telling people that spamming folks with cold emails is the way to grow your business, but I’m begging them to stop.

I mean, it must be working, or they wouldn’t do it. But it’s just incredibly frustrating. Especially if you’re someone like me that doesn’t like to be mean to people. My deeply-instilled British values of politeness mean it pains me to ignore these people.

But I have to, or I wouldn’t be able to function. Just replying to these people would be a full-time job.

So imagine my dismay when I discovered there are websites out there specialising in making it even easier to contact me. And one of the worst offenders out there is RocketReach.

https://cookywook.co.uk/blog/rocketreach-and-the-creepy-world-of-data-harvesting/

#data #harvesting #BigData #privacy #rocketreach #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv