Entries Tagged "privacy"

Page 15 of 144

Apple Mail Now Blocks Email Trackers

Apple Mail now blocks email trackers by default.

Most email newsletters you get include an invisible “image,” typically a single white pixel, with a unique file name. The server keeps track of every time this “image” is opened and by which IP address. This quirk of internet history means that marketers can track exactly when you open an email and your IP address, which can be used to roughly work out your location.

So, how does Apple Mail stop this? By caching. Apple Mail downloads all images for all emails before you open them. Practically speaking, that means every message downloaded to Apple Mail is marked “read,” regardless of whether you open it. Apples also routes the download through two different proxies, meaning your precise location also can’t be tracked.

Crypto-Gram uses Mailchimp, which has these tracking pixels turned on by default. I turn them off. Normally, Mailchimp requires them to be left on for the first few mailings, presumably to prevent abuse. The company waived that requirement for me.

Posted on May 9, 2022 at 9:39 AM • View Comments

Video Conferencing Apps Sometimes Ignore the Mute Button

New research: “Are You Really Muted?: A Privacy Analysis of Mute Buttons in Video Conferencing Apps“:

Abstract: In the post-pandemic era, video conferencing apps (VCAs) have converted previously private spaces—bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens—into semi-public extensions of the office. And for the most part, users have accepted these apps in their personal space, without much thought about the permission models that govern the use of their personal data during meetings. While access to a device’s video camera is carefully controlled, little has been done to ensure the same level of privacy for accessing the microphone. In this work, we ask the question: what happens to the microphone data when a user clicks the mute button in a VCA? We first conduct a user study to analyze users’ understanding of the permission model of the mute button. Then, using runtime binary analysis tools, we trace raw audio in many popular VCAs as it traverses the app from the audio driver to the network. We find fragmented policies for dealing with microphone data among VCAs—some continuously monitor the microphone input during mute, and others do so periodically. One app transmits statistics of the audio to its telemetry servers while the app is muted. Using network traffic that we intercept en route to the telemetry server, we implement a proof-of-concept background activity classifier and demonstrate the feasibility of inferring the ongoing background activity during a meeting—cooking, cleaning, typing, etc. We achieved 81.9% macro accuracy on identifying six common background activities using intercepted outgoing telemetry packets when a user is muted.

The paper will be presented at PETS this year.

News article.

Posted on April 29, 2022 at 9:18 AM • View Comments

Using Radar to Read Body Language

Yet another method of surveillance:

Radar can detect you moving closer to a computer and entering its personal space. This might mean the computer can then choose to perform certain actions, like booting up the screen without requiring you to press a button. This kind of interaction already exists in current Google Nest smart displays, though instead of radar, Google employs ultrasonic sound waves to measure a person’s distance from the device. When a Nest Hub notices you’re moving closer, it highlights current reminders, calendar events, or other important notifications.

Proximity alone isn’t enough. What if you just ended up walking past the machine and looking in a different direction? To solve this, Soli can capture greater subtleties in movements and gestures, such as body orientation, the pathway you might be taking, and the direction your head is facing—­aided by machine learning algorithms that further refine the data. All this rich radar information helps it better guess if you are indeed about to start an interaction with the device, and what the type of engagement might be.

[…]

The ATAP team chose to use radar because it’s one of the more privacy-friendly methods of gathering rich spatial data. (It also has really low latency, works in the dark, and external factors like sound or temperature don’t affect it.) Unlike a camera, radar doesn’t capture and store distinguishable images of your body, your face, or other means of identification. “It’s more like an advanced motion sensor,” Giusti says. Soli has a detectable range of around 9 feet­—less than most cameras­—but multiple gadgets in your home with the Soli sensor could effectively blanket your space and create an effective mesh network for tracking your whereabouts in a home.

“Privacy-friendly” is a relative term.

These technologies are coming. They’re going to be an essential part of the Internet of Things.

Posted on March 8, 2022 at 6:01 AM • View Comments

Vulnerability in Stalkerware Apps

TechCrunch is reporting—but not describing in detail—a vulnerability in a series of stalkerware apps that exposes personal information of the victims. The vulnerability isn’t in the apps installed on the victims’ phones, but in the website the stalker goes to view the information the app collects. The article is worth reading, less for the description of the vulnerability and more for the shadowy string of companies behind these stalkerware apps.

Posted on March 2, 2022 at 6:25 AM • View Comments

Privacy Violating COVID Tests

A good lesson in reading the fine print:

Cignpost Diagnostics, which trades as ExpressTest and offers £35 tests for holidaymakers, said it holds the right to analyse samples from seals to “learn more about human health”—and sell information on to third parties.

Individuals are required to give informed consent for their sensitive medical data to be used ­ but customers’ consent for their DNA to be sold now as buried in Cignpost’s online documents.

Of course, no one ever reads the fine print.

EDITED TO ADD (3/12): The original story.

Posted on February 25, 2022 at 6:15 AM • View Comments

Bypassing Apple’s AirTag Security

A Berlin-based company has developed an AirTag clone that bypasses Apple’s anti-stalker security systems. Source code for these AirTag clones is available online.

So now we have several problems with the system. Apple’s anti-stalker security only works with iPhones. (Apple wrote an Android app that can detect AirTags, but how many people are going to download it?) And now non-AirTags can piggyback on Apple’s system without triggering the alarms.

Apple didn’t think this through nearly as well as it claims to have. I think the general problem is one that I have written about before: designers just don’t have intimate threats in mind when building these systems.

Posted on February 23, 2022 at 6:28 AM • View Comments

Possible Government Surveillance of the Otter.ai Transcription App

A reporter interviews a Uyghur human-rights advocate, and uses the Otter.ai transcription app.

The next day, I received an odd note from Otter.ai, the automated transcription app that I had used to record the interview. It read: “Hey Phelim, to help us improve your Otter’s experience, what was the purpose of this particular recording with titled ‘Mustafa Aksu’ created at ‘2021-11-08 11:02:41’?”

Customer service or Chinese surveillance? Turns out it’s hard to tell.

EDITED TO ADD (3/12): Another article.

Posted on February 17, 2022 at 10:40 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.