Privacy

The president-elect announced that Tom Homan — one of the architects of Trump’s family separation policy — will play a major role in his administration.

In 2022, Homan spoke at a conference organized by white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Starting next year, he’ll “be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

He asked the Commerce Department to strengthen rules designed to prevent repressive regimes from using US-made surveillance technology to spy on dissidents, journalists, and Americans.

The proposed export controls will make it harder for regimes to engage in human rights abuses ranging from mass surveillance of their citizens to hacking into the phones of dissidents and independent journalists. However, I am concerned that the draft rules contain gaps that would allow autocratic governments to continue buying technologies and services from American companies to commit human rights abuses.

An IT consultant, Nunzio Samuele Calamucci, allegedly breached Italy’s Interior Ministry databases on behalf of Equalize, a private investigations company run by a former Italian police officer.

Equalize used a computer virus to break into government databases, prosecutors claim.

In wiretaps, Calamucci, who worked for Equalize, allegedly boasted of having hacked the information of 800,000 people.

Several Italian politicians were among those who were hacked. And agents with Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, allegedly tried to buy information from Equalize.

The ruling was made by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) following a complaint filed in 2018 that said LinkedIn’s tracking ads business violated GDPR.

DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle commented:

“The lawfulness of processing is a fundamental aspect of data protection law and the processing of personal data without an appropriate legal basis is a clear and serious violation of a data subjects’ fundamental right to data protection.”

While it might be fun to interact with Character.AI’s user-created chatbots, a report from Wired shows the challenges of taking down chatbots that impersonate people without their consent, including a teen who was murdered in 2006:

Given that Character.AI can sometimes take a week to investigate and remove a persona that violates the platform’s terms, a bot can still operate for long enough to upset someone whose likeness is being used. But it might not be enough for a person to claim real “harm” from a legal perspective, experts say.

State Attorney General Ken Paxton alleges that TikTok has violated the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act by not giving parents control of their kids’ privacy and account settings, writes Reuters. TikTok denied the allegations in a statement to The Texas Tribune.

TikTok A federal judge blocked part of the act requiring large social networks to stop harmful content from reaching minors just prior to the law taking effect on September 1st.

In a blog post, Mozilla president Mark Surman writes about the organization’s plans to fix the “fundamentally broken” online advertising industry:

We have the beginnings of a theory on what fixing it might look like — a mix of different business practices, technology, products, and public policy engagements. And we have started to do work on all of these fronts.

You can read Mozilla’s full plan in the post linked below.

With exceptions for users under 18, posts that weren’t set to public, or EU accounts that opted out.

Now ABC reports on Australian senator David Shoebridge's question to Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh.

Shoebridge: “...Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That’s the reality, isn’t it?”

Claybaugh: “Correct.”

As reported by 404 Media, a survey from the anti-human trafficking nonprofit Thorn revealed that 1 in 10 minors said they knew of peers who used AI to create nudes of other kids:

While the motivation behind these events is more likely driven by adolescents acting out than an intent to sexually abuse, the resulting harms to victims are real and should not be minimized in attempts to wave off responsibility. 

In March, two Florida teens were arrested for creating deepfake nudes of classmates.

The company doesn’t know if the issue is related to an App Store bug, or if Apple is “secretly implementing a censorship order,” as it’s apparently affecting “multiple other VPNs” on iOS in Brazil.

On Saturday, X shut down its operations in Brazil over claims the government gave it secret “censorship orders.”