In one of the largest-ever breaches of a US telecom giant, AT&T revealed this week that “nearly all” its customer phone and text records were stolen after hackers accessed its account on a third-party cloud service. That cloud service, Snowflake, has been linked to several recent breaches, including those of …
Read More »The Sweeping Danger of the AT&T Phone Records Breach
From targeted wiretaps to bulk surveillance dragnets, phone companies have been at the center of privacy concerns for decades—and their time in the limelight isn't over yet. On Friday, telecom giant AT&T announced that it recently suffered a data breach impacting call and text messaging records of “nearly all” its …
Read More »Google Is Adding Passkey Support for Its Most Vulnerable Users
The password killers known as “passkeys” are now available to users of Google's Advanced Protection Program, which works to add an additional layer of account protection for people who fear that they could face targeted digital attacks. The company is more than a year into supporting passkeys for all regular …
Read More »Google’s Nonconsensual Explicit Images Problem Is Getting Worse
In early 2022, two Google policy staffers met with a trio of women victimized by a scam that resulted in explicit videos of them circulating online—including via Google search results. The women were among the hundreds of young adults who responded to ads seeking swimsuit models only to be coerced …
Read More »Hackers Leaking Taylor Swift Tickets? Don’t Get Your Hopes Up
Proton, the company behind Proton Mail, launched an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Docs, seeking to compete with the cloud giant on privacy. We broke down how Apple is taking a similar approach with its implementation of AI, using a system it calls Private Cloud Compute in its new Apple …
Read More »How Apple Intelligence’s Privacy Stacks Up Against Android’s ‘Hybrid AI’
At its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 10, Apple announced a late but major move into AI with “Apple Intelligence,” confirming months-long rumors that it would partner with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to iPhones. Elon Musk, one of the cofounders of OpenAI, was quick to respond on X, branding ChatGPT-powered …
Read More »Proton Is Launching Encrypted Documents to Take On Google Docs
When particle physicist Andy Yen launched the privacy-focused email service Proton Mail as an ambitious crowdfunding campaign in 2014, the ultimate goal was to make it easier for people to be private online. Now, more than a decade on, his Switzerland-based company, Proton, is in the process of taking one …
Read More »The Tech Crash Course That Trains US Diplomats to Spot Threats
In a sunlight-filled classroom at the US State Department’s diplomacy school in late February, America’s cyber ambassador fielded urgent questions from US diplomats who were spending the week learning about the dizzying technological forces shaping their missions. “This portfolio is one of the most interesting and perhaps the most consequential …
Read More »Meta’s Pay-for-Privacy Model Is Illegal, Says EU
For the past eight months, Europeans uncomfortable with the way Meta tracks their data for personalized advertising have had another option: They can pay the tech giant up to €12.99 ($14) per month for their privacy instead. Launched in November 2023, Meta introduced its “pay or consent” subscription model as …
Read More »Google Is Piloting Face Recognition for Office Security
WIRED learned this week that Amazon Web Services investigated claims that the AI search startup Perplexity may have violated the cloud company's rules by appearing to pull data from websites that have attempted to shield themselves from such scraping. The news comes after WIRED published findings last week about the …
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