Privacy

One afternoon in late 2021, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, met with the commander of Israel’s military surveillance agency, Unit 8200. On the spy chief’s agenda: moving vast amounts of top secret intelligence material into the US company’s cloud.

Meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters near Seattle, a former chicken farm turned hi-tech campus, the spymaster, Yossi Sariel, won Nadella’s support for a plan that would grant Unit 8200 access to a customised and segregated area within Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

Armed with Azure’s near-limitless storage capacity, Unit 8200 began building a powerful new mass surveillance tool: a sweeping and intrusive system that collects and stores recordings of millions of mobile phone calls made each day by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

A jury has unanimously found Meta guilty of violating the California Invasion of Privacy Act by using data from menstruation and fertility app Flo to sell advertising to the social network.

"This is a landmark moment in the effort to safeguard digital privacy rights," said Michael Canty, lead trial attorney at Labaton Keller Sucharow LLP, representing the plaintiffs, in an emailed statement to The Register.

"Our clients entrusted their most sensitive information to a health app, only to have it exploited by one of the world’s most powerful tech companies. This verdict is a wake-up call to companies that view consent as a formality and transparency as optional."

Founded in 2015, Flo Health makes an iOS and Android app that about 70 million people use each month, according to the company. It can track not only period cycles and ovulation, but also sexual activity and health issues, should the user add in that data.

However, in 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported Flo was sharing health events with Meta.

OQB: @spinning_disk_engineer@lemmy.ca

I'm looking into getting some domains for email, so I don't need to use the same few addresses for everything. In doing this, the domain name itself becomes the identity, but it's also entirely arbitrary.

What is a good method to choose domain names so that they look more or less normal? Catch all addresses can of course be detected in SMTP, but the idea is just to not look suspicious. Would anyone be comfortable sharing the constructions they use? (though not the domains themselves, for obvious reasons) Should I use subdomains for the things that can safely be correlated, (as spam defense) or is it better to only use different mailboxes on one domain?

Does anyone know if there are any lemmy instances hosted on i2p or tor?

If not, does it make sense to host one that would potentially be more privacy friendly? I'm also wondering if it should be it's own "fediverse" completely inside of i2p (and/or tor) and not have access to the clearnet?

YouTube announced on Tuesday that it will begin to use artificial intelligence to estimate the ages of users in the US, in order to show them age-appropriate content.

The rollout of the new feature comes one day after Australia’s government announced it would ban children under 16 from using YouTube and less than a week after the UK implemented sweeping age checks on content on social networks.

YouTube’s AI age verification on its home turf indicates it is putting into place a form of compliance with the Australian and UK requirements, despite its persistent opposition to age-check requirements.

“Over the next few weeks, we’ll begin to roll out machine learning to a small set of users in the US to estimate their age, so that teens are treated as teens and adults as adults,” wrote James Beser, director of product management for YouTube Youth, in a blogpost titled Extending our built-in protections to more teens on YouTube.