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Add “a phone number I never gave Facebook for targeted advertising” to the list of deceptive and invasive ways Facebook makes money off your personal information. Contrary to user expectations and Facebook representatives’ own previous statements, the company has been using contact information that users explicitly provided for security purposes—or that users never provided at all —for targeted advertising. A group of academic researchers from Northeastern University and Princeton University , along with Gizmodo reporters , have used real-world tests...
Over the weekend, Gov. Jerry Brown signed S.B. 822, which guarantees strong net neutrality protections for citizens of California. Within hours, however, the federal government announced its intention to sue California for stepping in where the feds have abdicated responsibility. What happens next is going to be full of procedural issues and technicalities. First, some background. Millions of Americans opposed the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) decision to abandon its authority to enforce net neutrality, competition, and privacy under its Restoring...
A coalition of the four largest U.S. wireless providers calling itself the Mobile Authentication Taskforce recently announced an initiative named Project Verify . This project would let users log in to apps and websites with their phone instead of a password, or serve as an alternative to multi-factor authentication methods such as SMS or hardware tokens. Any work to find a more secure and user-friendly solution than passwords is worthwhile. However, the devil is always in the details—and this project...