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Attorney General William P. Barr declared on Monday that a deadly shooting last month at a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla., was an act of terrorism, and he asked Apple in an unusually high-profile request to provide access to two phones used by the gunman.Mr. Barr’s appeal was an escalation of a continuing fight between the Justice Department and Apple pitting personal privacy against public safety. “This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that the public be able to get access to digital evidence,” Mr. Barr said, calling on technology companies to find a solution and complaining that...

HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is continuing the industry's push to incorporate social factors that influence health—like food insecurity and homelessness—into patient care. The 2020 edition of the ONC's interoperability standards advisory, a collection of agency-recognized interoperability standards and implementation specifications, includes resources to support sharing information on four new categories of data related to social determinants: drug use, food insecurity, housing insecurity and transportation insecurity. "As factors like these can greatly impact one's overall health, ensuring this information is known, and captured in clinical systems and available to providers is important," wrote the ONC's...

Apple made some waves at CES 2019 by placing a billboard outside the Las Vegas Convention Center that needled its competitors over user privacy. This year, the company will have an official presence, with Jane Horvath, its senior director of global privacy, set to appear January 9 on a panel called the Chief Privacy Officer Roundtable. The company will be showing off its HomeKit smart home platform during CES. There, Horvath will likely argue for increased privacy protections. The roundtable is also expected to be attended by executives from Facebook and Procter & Gamble, as well as a Federal Trade...

Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, says it's giving all users more control of their own data. The change is spurred by the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, which went into effect Wednesday. The new data privacy law gives California residents the right to know what personal data tech companies collect. It also enables people to ask companies to delete their data and not sell it. Mozilla said changes it's making under the CCPA will apply to every Firefox user, not just those in California. In a blog post Tuesday, Mozilla said it'll give Firefox users the option...

ToTok, an Emirati messaging app that has been downloaded to millions of phones, is the latest escalation of a digital arms race. IMAGE: The Aldar Building in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where the Emirates’ signals intelligence agency and Pax AI, a data mining firm linked to ToTok, have their offices.  Photo Credit...Ben Job/ReutersWASHINGTON — It is billed as an easy and secure way to chat by video or text message with friends and family, even in a country that has restricted popular messaging services like WhatsApp and Skype.But the service, ToTok, is actually a spying tool, according to American officials...

A mother has released a chilling video of a hacker talking to her eight-year-old daughter through a Ring security camera in her bedroom. The footage was recorded at the family home in Desoto County, Mississippi. Ashley LeMay had installed the Ring security camera in order to watch over her three daughters and to feel connected to them during her night shifts as a nurse.

On Dec. 10, Lisa Page filed a complaint against the Department of Justice and the FBI for alleged violations of the Privacy Act related to the disclosure of information about her to the media. The document is available here and below.

Kudos to Margaret Brennan of CBS for asking Adam Schiff on Sunday about his release of phone logs of his political opponents. Mr. Schiff dismissed any criticism, and his reason is revealing about the balance of power in Washington. “The blowback has only come from the far right,” Mr. Schiff said. “But look, every investigator seeks phone records to corroborate, sometimes to contradict, a witness’s testimony.” Yes, but executive-branch investigators who want to get data from private telecom companies typically must obtain some kind of judicial order. Mr. Schiff did it himself. Prosecutors are also supposed to limit the release...

It was bad enough for House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) to subpoena the phone records of businessman Lev Parnas and President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani and other political opponents, but when he released them in his impeachment report it was a stunning abuse of power. In the view of columnist Kimberly Strassel, Schiff’s move “trampled law and responsibility…it was a disgraceful breach of ethical and legal propriety.” Not surprisingly, Trump-hating members of the news media trumpeted the release of the call records as a major step toward the President’s impeachment. Their desire to destroy the President is so...

When Mike Carpenter learned Google’s latest acquisition would be Fitbit, the maker of a device he wore at all hours of the day except in the shower, he left his Fitbit Charge 3 on the table at his office where he was working that day. He, and others like him, haven’t picked it up since. On Nov. 1, Google said would be buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion in hopes of boosting its hardware business getting a foothold in the health space. Google explicitly said in the announcing the deal that it won’t sell users' personal or health data. Despite that...

(CNN) — Facebook says a bug that inadvertently accesses a user's iPhone camera while they're scrolling through the News Feed will be fixed sometime today. The bug, which was discovered by Joshua Maddux, owner of web design firm 95Visual, appears to be exclusive to iOS and does not affect Android devices. Maddux took to Twitter to report his discovery, where he posted a video that showed his camera, pointing forward, was running in the background while he was scrolling Facebook. "I thought I had opened the camera by accident," Maddux wrote in an email to CNN of the discovery. "Then,...

People are finally waking up to the importance of privacy and the risk of entities over whom we have no control hoovering up the details of our digital lives, and that’s why the latest news from Duck Duck Go is so worthwhile. Apple’s good privacy just got better We know Apple is working to protect privacy – its newly updated privacy website shares a huge amount of information on its efforts, while the newly-published Safari white paper confirms the browser’s privacy protections include (among other things): Protection from cross-site tracking. Ad measurement tools that respect user privacy. Secure payments. Sign-in...

If you have ever owned a smartphone, shopped online, bought an airline ticket or used a credit card, you are being secretly scored in ways that can impact your wallet. The scorers are businesses we buy products and services from every day. They are called Customer Lifetime Value or CLV scores. All sorts of retailers and businesses use them to judge our value as consumers... most businesses will not tell you what your score is. “It’s not your right as a consumer right now,” Thomas said. “Nobody has legislated that it’s your right to see it and to have input...

or police officers around the country, the genetic profiles that 20 million people have uploaded to consumer DNA sites represent a tantalizing resource that could be used to solve cases both new and cold. But for years, the vast majority of the data have been off-limits to investigators. The two largest sites, Ancestry.com and 23andMe, have long pledged to keep their users’ genetic information private, and a smaller one, GEDmatch, severely restricted police access to its records this year. Last week, however, a Florida detective announced at a police convention that he had obtained a warrant to penetrate GEDmatch and...

Audio from two Amazon Echo devices has been handed over to police as they investigate the death of a Florida woman who was impaled by a spear during an argument with her husband. Silvia Galva, 32, died when a spear impaled her chest in her Hallandale Beach condo back in July. Her 43-year-old husband, Adam Crespo, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. According to a search warrant obtained by CBS4, police requested the audio recordings from two Amazon Echo devices that the couple had in their home at the time Galva died.

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the USA PATRIOT Act - a textbook example of how the United States federal government expands its power. The American public largely accepts the USA PATRIOT Act as a part of civic life as immutable, perhaps even more so than the Bill of Rights. However, this act – passed in the dead of night, with little to no oversight, in a panic after the biggest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor – is not only novel, it is also fundamentally opposed to virtually every principle on which the United States of America was founded....

They might find a particular marker or something that indicates you may have a predisposition or high likelihood of breast cancer or Alzheimer's.... What could go wrong?

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George Gilder | Life After Google

A hospital in Maine is apologizing after the state's Human Rights Commission said workers had created a “wall of shame” ridiculing disabled patients and incorporating confidential medical information, according to CNN. MyKayla McCann, an employee who was treated at St. Mary's Regional Medical Center in Lewiston, said that at least two co-workers looked at her medical records and that after she returned from a leave of absence she believed they were treating her differently. In September 2016, she reported her discomfort and the “wall of shame,” which included details of patients’ sexual activity, bodily functions and private parts, according to...