Category: privacy

While it’s a good thing that Wyze is giving customers a heads-up, the flip side is that everyone is getting a heads-up. It’s posting a sign that any location using this equipment will be unprotected between these hours, with basically no notice to create a backup plan or take other precautions, depending on your security concerns. It’s also worrisome that the professional security customers have paid for and rely on can be completely disabled for “maintenance.”

At first, the code will be open for auditing purposes only, but in the future it may start accepting contributions too –” however, there is no suggestion that it will go all-in and allow the public to fork or otherwise re-use the code in their own applications. Dashlane has released the code under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license, which technically means that users are allowed to copy, share and build upon the codebase so long as it’s for non-commercial purposes. However, the company said that it has stripped out some key elements from its release, effectively hamstringing what third-party developers are able to do with the code. […]

“The main benefit of making this code public is that anyone can audit the code and understand how we build the Dashlane mobile application,” the company wrote. “Customers and the curious can also explore the algorithms and logic behind password management software in general. In addition, business customers, or those who may be interested, can better meet compliance requirements by being able to review our code.” On top of that, the company says that a benefit of releasing its code is to perhaps draw-in technical talent, who can inspect the code prior to an interview and perhaps share some ideas on how things could be improved. Moreover, so-called “white-hat hackers” will now be better equipped to earn bug bounties. “Transparency and trust are part of our company values, and we strive to reflect those values in everything we do,” Dashlane continued. “We hope that being transparent about our code base will increase the trust customers have in our product.”

On Apple’s device analytics and privacy legal page, the company says no information collected from a device for analytics purposes is traceable back to a specific user. “iPhone Analytics may include details about hardware and operating system specifications, performance statistics, and data about how you use your devices and applications. None of the collected information identifies you personally,” the company claims. In one possible differentiator, Apple says that if a user agrees to send analytics information from multiple devices logged onto the same iCloud account, it may “correlate some usage data about Apple apps across those devices by syncing using end-to-end encryption.” Even in doing so, however, Apple says the user remains unidentifiable to Apple. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.

Details of the database were revealed Thursday in a letter to CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who criticized the agency for “allowing indiscriminate rifling through Americans’ private records” and called for stronger privacy protections. The revelations add new detail to what’s known about the expanding ways that federal investigators use technology that many Americans may not understand or consent to. Agents from the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another Department of Homeland Security agency, have run facial recognition searches on millions of Americans’ driver’s license photos. They have tapped private databases of people’s financial and utility records to learn where they live. And they have gleaned location data from license-plate reader databases that can be used to track where people drive.

The StockApps.com report does not list what it describes as the “data points” that Big Tech firms collect for every user. However, it says they include location details, browser history, activity on third-party websites, and in Google’s case, also emails in Gmail. It also doesn’t detail its methodology, but does say that it used marketing firm digitalinformationworld to investigate Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Of these five, Google reportedly tracks 39 separate data points per user, while Apple tracks only 12. Unexpectedly, Facebook is stated as tracking only 14 data points, while Amazon tracks 23, and Twitter tracks 24.

Tutanota recently called out Microsoft for blocking Tutanota users from registering an account with its cloud-based collaboration platform, Teams.

The FCC proposed the $200 million fines in February 2020. The fines came after Motherboard revealed that the carriers sold phone location data to a complex supply chain of companies which then provided it to hundreds of bounty hunters and other third parties, including someone that allowed Motherboard to track a phone for just $300. The fines also came after The New York Times and the office of Sen. Ron Wyden found that the carriers sold location data in a similar method to a company called Securus, which allowed law enforcement officials to track the location of phones without a warrant. A former sheriff abused the tool to spy on judges and other officials. The offending telecoms — AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon — said they stopped the sale of location data at varying points in time in response to the investigations. The FCC then found that the carriers broke the law by selling such data.

FCC Press Secretary Paloma Perez told Motherboard in an emailed statement that “our real-time location information is some of the most sensitive data there is about us, and it deserves the highest level of privacy protection. That is why the FCC has proposed more than $200 million in fines against the nation’s largest wireless carriers for selling their customers’ location data. Through our continued oversight we have ensured that these carriers are no longer monetizing their consumers’ real-time location in this way, and we are continuing our investigation into these practices and expect to reach a conclusion very soon.” In July FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel sent letters to a host of U.S. telecommunications, tech, and retail companies to ask about their use of location data.

The Librem 5 USA now joins the Librem Mini and Librem 14 as a post-Just In Time product, one where instead of relying on Just In Time supply chains to manufacture a product just as we need it, we have invested in maintaining much larger inventories so that we can better absorb future supply chain issues that may come our way.

For anyone who is new to the product, the Librem 5 USA is our premium phone that shares the same hardware design and features as our mass-produced Librem 5, but with electronics we make in the USA using a separate electronics supply chain that sources from US suppliers whenever possible. This results in a tighter, more secure supply chain for the Librem 5 USA.

The Librem 5 USA uses the same PureOS as our other computers and so it runs the same desktop Linux applications you might be used to, just on a small screen.

PureOS on the Librem 5 USA demonstrates real convergence, where the device becomes more than just a phone, it becomes a full-featured pocket-sized computer that can act like a desktop when connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, or even a laptop (or tablet!) when connected to a laptop docking station. All of your files and all of your software remains the same and follows you where you go. Applications just morph from the smaller screen to the larger screen when docked, just like connecting a external monitor to a laptop.

Everyone who has backed the Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA projects hasn’t just supported the production of the hardware itself, they have also supported a massive, multi-year software development effort to bring the traditional Linux desktop to a phone form-factor. Projects such as Phosh (the GUI), Phoc (the Compositor), Squeekboard (the Keyboard), Calls (for calling), Chats (for texting and messaging), and libhandy/libadwaita (libraries to make GTK applications adaptive) all required massive investment and many of these projects have already been moved to the GNOME infrastructure to better share our effort with a larger community.

We are delighted to see that many other mobile projects have recognized the quality of our efforts and adopted our software into their own projects….

The Librem 5 USA was designed for longevity and because we support right to repair, we also offer a number of spare parts in our shop, including replacement modems so you can make sure you support all the cellular bands in a particular continent, replacement batteries for when you ultimately wear out your existing battery, and plenty of other spare parts that haven’t had sufficient demand to post formally on our shop (yet). If you need a spare part that isn’t yet on the shop, just ask.

“You’d be in good company too: Apple CEO Tim Cook had his home blurred from mapping apps after issues with a stalker.”

There is something to bear in mind before you do this, though: you may not be able to reverse the process. The blur could be there for good. This is the case for Google Maps, and while Apple and Microsoft don’t specify whether blurs on their services are permanent, they may follow the same protocol or decide to do so in the future.

The case for blurring? “Having strangers from all over the world stare at your home isn’t necessarily something you want to happen — but it can be done in seconds on the mapping apps we all carry around on our phones.” (“Stop people from peering at your place,” suggests the article’s subtitle.)

But is there also a case against demanding platforms blur what’s essentially just the exterior of a building? Where’s the boundary where we’re honoring the wishes of the privacy-conscious — and does the public ever have a right to see? Share your own thoughts in the comments.

And would you blur your house on every map app?

(Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article…)