All news with #privacy engineering tag

🛡️A leaked draft of the EU Commission’s proposed “Digital Omnibus” would amend the GDPR to absorb cookie rules and relax limits on AI training with personal data. The draft, due to be presented on 19 November 2025, would add Article 88a to move cookie regulation into the GDPR and allow processing on a closed list of low‑risk purposes or other legal bases including legitimate interest. Critics warn this shifts tracking from opt‑in to opt‑out and risks diluting privacy protections, while the proposal also narrows sensitive‑data protections and requires browsers to transmit consent preferences.

🔒 Mozilla has rolled out enhanced anti-fingerprinting protections in Firefox 145, initially active in Private Browsing and Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) Strict mode. Phase 2 measures add targeted noise to background image reads, restrict reported fonts to standard OS sets with select language exceptions, coarsen touch reporting, report screen height minus 48 pixels, and always report two processor cores. After testing these changes will be enabled by default; users can disable them per-site for compatibility. The release also removes the 32-bit Linux build.

🔎 Google says a forthcoming AI Mode for Search could, with users' opt-in consent, access content from Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Maps to provide customized results and actions. The company is testing early experiments in Labs for personalized shopping and local recommendations, and suggests features like flight summaries, scheduling, or trip planning could leverage that data. Timing remains TBD.

🔒 Lena Heimberger examines the challenge of building post-quantum Anonymous Credentials that are practical for large-scale use. The post summarizes real-world needs — from the EU digital identity wallet to Cloudflare’s Privacy Pass rate-limiting — and defines key requirements like unlinkability, unforgeability, round-optimality, and per-origin rate limits. It surveys PQ approaches (generic ZKP composition, lattice-based signatures, hash-and-sign with aborts, and MPC-in-the-head/VOLEitH), evaluates trade-offs in bandwidth and latency, and calls for standardized ZK-friendly hashes and PQ-native protocol designs.

🔒 Microsoft-owned LinkedIn will begin using profile details, public posts and feed activity from users in the UK, EU, Switzerland, Canada and Hong Kong to train generative AI models and to support personalised ads across Microsoft starting 3 November 2025. Private messages are excluded. Users can opt out via Settings & Privacy > Data Privacy and toggle Data for Generative AI Improvement to Off. Organisations should update social media policies and remind staff to review their advertising and data-sharing settings.

🔒 Incogni’s Social Media Privacy Ranking 2025 evaluates 15 major platforms across data collection, resale, AI training, privacy settings, and regulatory fines. The analysis identifies Pinterest and Quora as the most privacy-conscious, while TikTok and Facebook rank lowest, driven by extensive data use and historical penalties. The report highlights practical differences in opt-outs, data-sharing, and default settings and recommends users review privacy controls and use Kaspersky’s Privacy Checker.

🔒 Incogni's Social Media Privacy Ranking 2025, summarized by Kaspersky, evaluates 15 platforms across 18 criteria to compare messaging apps on privacy and data handling. Overall scores place Discord, Telegram and Snapchat near the top, but a subset of practical criteria ranks Telegram first, followed by Snapchat and Discord. The analysis highlights default settings, data collection by mobile apps, handling of government requests, and encryption differences, noting that only WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption for all chats by default.

🔒 Starting 3 November 2025, Mozilla will require new Firefox extension developers to declare data collection practices in manifest.json via a browser_specific_settings.gecko.data_collection_permissions key. Developers must adopt the framework across all extensions in the first half of 2026, and extensions that collect no personal data must state that explicitly. The declared practices will appear during installation, on the add-on listing, and in about:addons; submissions that omit the declaration will be blocked.

🔒 DeepSeek collects extensive interaction data — chats, images and videos — plus account details, IP address and device/browser information, and retains it for an unspecified period under a vague “retain as long as needed” policy. The service operates under Chinese jurisdiction, so stored chats may be accessible to local authorities and have been observed on China Mobile servers. Users can disable model training in web and mobile Data settings, export or delete chats (export is web-only), or run the open-source model locally to avoid server-side retention, but local deployment and deletion have trade-offs and require device protections.

🍪 Google has announced it is discontinuing 11 Privacy Sandbox technologies — effectively ending most of the company’s cookie‑replacement efforts after evaluating low adoption and ecosystem feedback. The decision follows regulatory scrutiny from the UK’s Competition and Market Authority and several U.S. antitrust actions, and came after prior concessions from Google. The company says it will continue to work on privacy improvements for Chrome, Android and the web but will move away from the Privacy Sandbox branding.

🔒 The DNS0.EU non‑profit public DNS resolver announced an immediate shutdown, citing unsustainable time and resource constraints for its volunteer team. Launched in 2023 and operated from France with 62 servers across 27 cities in all EU member states, the service supported no‑logs policies and modern encrypted transports including DNS‑over‑HTTPS, DNS‑over‑TLS, and DNS‑over‑QUIC. The operators thanked partners and urged users to migrate to DNS4EU or NextDNS, both of which offer privacy protections and defenses against malicious domains.

🔒 This article examines what ChatGPT collects, how OpenAI processes and stores user data, and the controls available to limit use for model training. It outlines region-specific policies (EEA/UK/Switzerland vs rest of world), the types of data gathered — from account and device details to prompts and uploads — and explains memory, Temporary Chats, connectors and app integrations. Practical steps cover disabling training, deleting memories and chats, managing connectors and Work with Apps, and securing accounts with strong passwords and multi-factor authentication.

🔍 Regularly search for yourself—names, emails and usernames—to uncover forgotten accounts, impersonators, and exposed data. Delete obsolete accounts, revoke third‑party access, clear browser and device traces, and use unique passwords stored in a reliable manager. Use tools like Just Delete Me and breach monitors such as Have I Been Pwned, invoke your right to be forgotten where applicable, and request archive removals. Tighten app permissions, unsubscribe from old lists, and consider privacy‑focused services or stronger 'paranoid' measures if needed.

🔍 The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) won an Upper Tribunal ruling that bolsters its authority to enforce the UK GDPR against Clearview AI and increases the likelihood of a previously issued £7.5m penalty being upheld. The tribunal found that Clearview’s scraping and global database usage involved monitoring the behavior of UK residents and is not beyond the reach of UK law even when services are provided to foreign law‑enforcement customers. The UT has directed the First‑Tier Tribunal to reconsider its earlier decision in light of this jurisdictional clarity, though Clearview may still appeal.

📍 iPhone users have reported receiving airport pickup prompts from Uber even when the app’s location permission is set to Only While Using. The notifications are generated locally by iOS using Apple’s UNLocationNotificationTrigger, which fires preconfigured alerts when a device enters or exits a geofenced area. Uber does not receive location data until you open the app, but the notification’s wording can misleadingly suggest active tracking.

🔍 A U.S. District Court complaint alleges that Norfolk, Virginia’s 176 Flock Safety automated license-plate readers tracked plaintiffs repeatedly as they drove — one retired veteran was logged 526 times and another resident 849 times between mid-February and early July. The September lawsuit contends that this pervasive, warrantless tracking raises serious Fourth Amendment and privacy issues. The ACLU and a 2024 ruling by Judge Jamilah LeCruise, which excluded warrantless plate-reader data in a robbery prosecution, underscore growing legal scrutiny.

🌐 Brave reached a new high in September with 101 million monthly active users and 42 million daily active users, marking the project's largest user base to date. Its privacy-focused Brave Search, built on an independent index, now handles about 1.6 billion queries per month (roughly 20 billion per year), with approximately 8% of queries coming from Chrome users. Regulatory shifts such as the EU Digital Markets Act and Apple’s iOS 17.4 update helped boost installs—iOS downloads in Europe rose about 50%—and Brave's steady gain of ~2.5 million new users per month, combined with privacy AI tools like the AI Answers summarizer (15 million responses/day) and the new Ask Brave chat-search integration, continue to drive adoption.

🔍 Zimperium zLabs’ analysis of 800 Android and iOS free VPN apps found widespread privacy and security weaknesses, including outdated libraries, weak encryption, and misleading privacy disclosures. The report highlights concrete failures such as vulnerable OpenSSL builds (including Heartbleed-era versions), roughly 1% of apps permitting Man-in-the-Middle decryption, and about 25% of iOS apps lacking valid privacy manifests. Researchers warn excessive permission requests and private entitlements increase risk, especially in BYOD and remote-work environments, and recommend stronger security models, endpoint visibility and zero-trust approaches.

🔎 Ask Brave unifies traditional search and AI chat into a single, privacy-focused interface accessible at search.brave.com/ask. The free feature combines search results with AI-generated responses and supports follow-up interaction in a chat-style format. Users can invoke it with a trailing “??”, the Ask button, or the Ask tab; it runs in standard or deep research modes.

🔒 The article argues that personal threat modeling must adapt as governments increasingly combine their extensive administrative records with corporate surveillance data. It details what kinds of government-held data exist, how firms augment those records, and the distinct dangers of targeted versus mass surveillance. Practical mitigations are discussed—encryption, scrubbing accounts, burner devices—and the piece stresses that every defensive choice is a trade-off tied to individual goals.