Privacy professionals

Privacy professionals

All of Mountain View's license plate cameras are being disabled, effective immediately, Police Chief Mike Canfield announced Monday afternoon. The move comes in the wake of the police department's disclosure last week that hundreds of law enforcement agencies had accessed the sensitive data in violation of the city's policies for over a year. The cameras will remain turned off until further direction is provided by the Mountain View City Council,

The mother of Stephen Lawrence has said she feels like "a victim all over again" after she learned about the alleged hacking of her phone by the Daily Mail, a court has heard. Baroness Doreen Lawrence, who says her phone was tapped and voicemails hacked, said the alleged actions of the newspaper reminded her of the police handling of the investigation into the racist murder of her son. She told the High Court the Mail was only "pretending" to support her campaign for justice for the "credibility of supporting a black family". The peer is among several high-profile figures - including the Duke of Sussex - suing the paper's publisher, Associated Newspapers (ANL).

Comcast is one step closer to settling 24 class action lawsuits over a 2023 data breach that potentially impacted over 30 million former and current customers.

Ad fraud isn't just a marketing problem anymore - it's a full-scale threat to the trust that powers the digital economy. In 2024 alone, fraud in mobile advertising jumped 21%, while programmatic ad fraud drained nearly $50 billion from the industry. During data privacy week 2026, these numbers serve as a reminder that ad fraud is not only about wasted budgets - it's also about how consumer data moves, gets tracked, and sometimes misused across complex ecosystems.

oh my gosh yall IG is a drug,

The moment you visit a website or app with ad space, it asks an ad tech company to determine which ads to display for you. This involves sending information about you and the content you're viewing to the ad tech company. This ad tech company packages all the information they can gather about you into a "bid request" and broadcasts it to of potential advertisers.

When WIRED attempted to post a link on Facebook, we received a message that read: "Posts that look like spam according to our Community Guidelines are blocked on Facebook and can't be edited." Hours later, however, that message was updated to read: "Your content couldn't be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards." The message linked to Meta's Community Standards homepage rather than a specific part of those rules.

It's more obvious than ever why recording encounters with federal agents matters: without bystander videos, it would be much harder to disprove the government's Orwellian lies about how Alex Pretti was killed last Saturday. But there are also risks when you pull out your phone to take a video at a protest or if you see an ICE agent abducting, say, a 5-year-old child. Here's what to know about how to protect your technology and yourself.

This Privacy Notice applies to all personal information processed by CoinDesk, including its affiliates and subsidiaries (" CoinDesk," " we," " us," or " our "). It covers the information CoinDesk collects through the websites, mobile applications, electronic devices, all other products and services we provide, any other services that display this Privacy Notice, all of the associated content, functionalities, and advertising, and when you communicate with us by phone, email, or otherwise (collectively, the " Services ").

TikTok also updated its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to inform users that it will be collecting "new types of information," including device geolocation. What has , though, is a clause stating that the app will also collect any information they disclose about their race, religion, health, sexual orientation, gender identity and citizenship or immigration status. Interestingly, this language was likely added in , which is before President Trump returned to office.

Parents and guardians in the UAE are now legally required to supervise their children's online activity under the country's new Child Digital Safety Law, which transforms digital safety from guidance into enforceable responsibility. The legislation applies not only to families but also to global platforms used by children in the UAE, even if those companies have no physical presence in the country.

"I'm a big believer in the free market. But we have to admit when the free market is not working. And it hasn't worked here,"

Today, I'm talking with Alex Lintner, who is the CEO of technology and software solutions at Experian, the credit reporting company. Experian is one of those multinationals that's so big and convoluted that it has multiple CEOs all over the world, so Alex and I spent quite a lot of time talking through the Decoder questions just so I could understand how Experian is structured, how it functions, and how the kinds of decisions Alex makes actually work in practice.

Microsoft provided the FBI with the recovery keys to unlock encrypted data on the hard drives of three laptops as part of a federal investigation, Forbes reported on Friday. Many modern Windows computers rely on full-disk encryption, called BitLocker, which is enabled by default. This type of technology should prevent anyone except the device owner from accessing the data if the computer is locked and powered off.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

We're diving into these data breaches and more with our latest EFFector newsletter. Since 1990, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This latest issue tracks U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) surveillance spending spree, explains how hackers are countering ICE's surveillance, and invites you to our free livestream covering online age verification mandates.