Senators Push Trump Administration for Clarity on Privacy Act
A group of influential lawmakers, including Sen. Ed Markey and Sen. Ron Wyden, are pressing the Trump administration for answers about how an executive order that includes changes to the Privacy Act will affect non-U.S. persons and whether the administration plans to release immigrants’ private data. The letter comes from six senators who are concerned about […]
House Passes Bill to Require Warrant for Old Emails
The House of Representatives has passed the Email Privacy Act, which requires law enforcement agencies to get a search warrant in order to obtain emails and some other stored records that are older than six months. The legislation is an effort to modify the old Electronic Communications Privacy Act to reflect the way that service […]
Vizio Settles FTC Charges Over Data Collection
Vizio has settled charges with the FTC and the state of New Jersey that it secretly collected TV owners’ viewing data, and will pay a $2.2 million fine and delete the data it gathered. The settlement is the result of Vizio using proprietary software that continuously tracked what TV owners were watching and sent the […]
How WhatsApp Rolled Out Encryption While Still Killing Spam
OAKLAND–WhatsApp has enjoyed tremendous growth in the last couple of years, a trend that accelerated even further when the company announced it was implementing end-to-end encryption on its messaging service. But that rollout also raised a serious issue for the company: how to identify spammers without access to the contents of users’ messages. Like most messaging services, […]
Google Wants to Encrypt the Web. Now.
OAKLAND–The security engineers at Google have spent years working on improving the security and reliability of Chrome, and it’s had a remarkable effect. They’re not satisfied with just raising the security bar for one browser, though, and now are pushing the rest of the industry and the web community at large to get with the program. […]
Expansion of National Security Letter Use Dropped From Intelligence Bill
A controversial provision in the Intelligence Authorization Act that would have granted the FBI the ability to access Americans’ browsing and email records without a warrant has been removed from the bill. The section of the appropriations bill for the various intelligence agencies had drawn criticism from civil liberties groups and lawmakers who opposed the […]
Bill Seeks to Update Ancient Email Privacy Law
A group of lawmakers from both parties have reintroduced a bill in the House of Representatives that would overhaul the aging Electronic Communications Privacy Act and add a provision to require the government to get a search warrant to access emails and other communications that are older than 180 days. The Email Privacy Act passed the House […]
Foreign Government Blamed for Anthem Data Breach
Attackers backed by a foreign government were behind the attack that compromised health insurance company Anthem in 2015, a breach that compromised the information of more than 78 million people, according to the findings of an investigation into the attack. The Anthem data breach is one of the larger health cae-related incidents ever in the United […]
Tor Browser Adds Sandbox
The newest release of the Tor browser for Linux now include a sandbox, which is designed to make it more difficult for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities. The Tor Project also is working on a sandbox mechanism for the browser on OS X. Most of the major browsers have added sandboxes in recent years in an […]