Free Republic

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Accelerometers are sensors for measuring acceleration forces. They can be found embedded in many types of mobile devices, including tablet PCs, smartphones, and smartwatches. Some common uses of built-in accelerometers are automatic image stabilization, device orientation detection, and shake detection. In contrast to sensors like microphones and cameras, accelerometers are widely regarded as not privacy-intrusive. This sentiment is reflected in protection policies of current mobile operating systems, where third-party apps can access accelerometer data without requiring security permission. It has been shown in experiments, however, that seemingly innocuous sensors can be used as a side channel to infer highly sensitive...

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Employees of a vendor paid to conduct COVID-19 contact tracing in Pennsylvania may have compromised the private information of at least 72,000 people, including their exposure status and their sexual orientation, the state Health Department said Thursday. Workers at Atlanta-based Insight Global “disregarded security protocols established in the contract and created unauthorized documents” outside the state’s secure data system ... “We are extremely dismayed that employees from Insight Global acted in a way that may have compromised this type of information and sincerely apologize to all impacted individuals,” Ciccocioppo said. Insight Global acknowledged it mishandled sensitive data and apologized. The...

Insurance company Geico suffered a data breach earlier this year that exposed customers’ driver’s license numbers for more than a month, according to a data breach notice filed with the attorney general of California. First reported by TechCrunch, Geico says in the notice that it has fixed the security issue that led to the breach. “We recently determined that between January 21, 2021 and March 1, 2021, fraudsters used information about you – which they acquired elsewhere – to obtain unauthorized access to your driver’s license number through the online sales system on our website,” the notice reads. “We have...

Facebook decided not to notify over 530 million of its users whose personal data was lifted in a breach sometime before August 2019 and was recently made available in a public database. Facebook also has no plans to do so, a spokesperson said. Phone numbers, full names, locations, some email addresses, and other details from user profiles were posted to an amateur hacking forum on Saturday, Business Insider reported last week. The leaked data includes personal information from 533 million Facebook users in 106 countries. In response to the reporting, Facebook said in a blog post on Tuesday that "malicious...

A user in a low level hacking forum has published the phone numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free online. The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses. Insider reviewed a sample of the leaked data and verified several records by matching known...

For months, critics of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) have suggested that his administration is underreporting the effects of the coronavirus pandemic in his state. The high-profile firing of (and subsequent investigation into) Florida’s top data manager contributed to such questions. Shortly before the 2020 election — in which DeSantis’s political ally, President Donald Trump, was being judged in part on his pandemic response — the state’s reported death numbers suddenly dropped.

Google is turning over user data to US law enforcement, even when requests for that come without a warrant, in the form of requests that are not court-ordered. That emerges from information shared with the LA Times by an anonymous Google user, who said they were notified about this in an email from the tech giant, who said the request came from the Department of Homeland Security, without including the request itself in the email. When this Google user asked to see the document, it turned out to be an administrative subpoena issued by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE),...

AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, must think we Americans are a bunch of ignorant rubes. After the company finally released results from its vaccine’s Stage 3 Trials, U.S. regulators were shocked to discover that the information was “outdated and potentially misleading.” The rosy picture the company painted of its vaccine on Monday — that it had a 79 percent efficacy against COVID-19 and substantially reduced serious illness — turns out to have been more PR than real. Stat: In a statement issued soon after midnight Tuesday morning, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said it...