Privacy Digest 06/22
The Kids Online Safety Act Is a Heavy-Handed Plan to Force Platforms to Spy on Young People
Putting children under surveillance and limiting their access to information doesn’t make them safer—in fact, research suggests just the opposite. Unfortunately those tactics are the ones endorsed by the Kids Online Safety Act of 2022 (KOSA), introduced by Sens. Blumenthal and Blackburn. The bill deserves credit for attempting to improve online data privacy for young people, and for attempting to update 1998’s Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). But its plan to require surveillance and censorship of anyone under sixteen would greatly endanger the rights, and safety, of young people online.
eff.org
How to install extensions in Safari - The Ghostery Guide
Installing extensions in Safari is still new to the majority of users and quite unintuitive. Knowing Apple, we dare to say, this will change. Until then, to reduce mental chatter and improve your experience with Ghostery for Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac, we composed these installation tutorials for you (feels like 1999 😬 but hey, whatever it takes!).
ghostery.com
US, EU Tentatively Agree on Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework
On March 25, 2022, the United States and the European Union tentatively agreed to a framework for the protection of the privacy of EU residents, and to act as a workaround from the EU court’s Schrems II decision that determined the previous Privacy Shield agreement between the EU and the U.S. was insufficient to protect the inherent privacy rights of EU residents, particularly with respect to activities of the U.S. intelligence community.
securityboulevard.com
Apple's privacy plans may involve further battle with advertisers
Ad-dependent companies like Facebook parent Meta are already upset about App Tracking Transparency, but Apple’s privacy plans may go further than this – and involve a further battle with advertisers that are trying to track users.
9to5mac.com
Ban Online Behavioral Advertising
Tech companies earn staggering profits by targeting ads to us based on our online behavior. This incentivizes all online actors to collect as much of our behavioral information as possible, and then sell it to ad tech companies and the data brokers that service them. This pervasive online behavioral surveillance apparatus turns our lives into open books—every mouse click and screen swipe can be tracked and then disseminated throughout the vast ad tech ecosystem. Sometimes this system is called “online behavioral advertising.”
eff.org
Who is LAPSUS$, the Big, Bad Cybercrime Gang Hacking Tech's Biggest Companies?
They're the new kids on the block, and their "extortion and destruction" hacks are swiping gigabytes of sensitive data. Their leader also might be 16.
gizmodo.com