NEWSWORTHY
China gaming giant Tencent to verify all players' identities by 2019
Tencent Holdings Ltd. will expand its age-verification system to encompass its entire games lineup, the firm has announced, in an unprecedented response to growing criticism that it encourages addiction among youths. The Chinese social media and entertainment titan intends to check all gamers' identities against ...
U.S. Supreme Court split on Google privacy settlement in class action suits
U.S. Supreme Court justices, in an internet privacy case involving Google, disagreed on Wednesday over whether to rein in a form of settlement in class action lawsuits that awards money to charities and other third parties instead of to people affected by the alleged ...
U.K. fines Facebook over Cambridge Analytica's use of users' data
British regulators on Thursday slapped Facebook with a fine of £500,000 ($644,000) — the maximum possible — for failing to protect the privacy of its users in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The Information Commissioner Office found that between 2007 and 2014, Facebook processed the personal ...
China spies on Trump's cellphone to sway policy, paper says; Russia also listens in
Chinese spies often eavesdrop on President Donald Trump when he uses his unsecure cellphone to talk with old friends, and Beijing uses what it learns to try to sway U.S. policy, The New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing current and former U.S. officials. Trump's ...
Japanese government orders Facebook to improve data protection
This is the first time the government’s Personal Information Protection Commission has issued this kind of warning to the U.S. social media giant.
Women live in fear as spycam epidemic takes hold in South Korea
South Korea is in the grip of a spycam epidemic, with covert footage of sex, nudity and urination posted online in what amounts to a "social death penalty" for thousands of women forced to live with a pornographic shadow. The footage may be taken surreptitiously ...
'Secret sharing': Researchers say they've found way to better encrypt genetic data
Using nothing more than a simple vial of saliva, millions of people have created DNA profiles on genealogy websites. But this wealth of information is effectively inaccessible to genetics researchers, with the sites painstakingly safeguarding their databases, fearful of a leak that could cost them ...
Spammers were behind recent Facebook data breach, company tentatively concludes
Facebook has tentatively concluded that spammers looking to make money, and not a nation-state, were behind the largest-ever data theft at the social media company, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The people behind the attack were a group of Facebook and Instagram spammers ...
New dating app DonaldDaters was supposed to help lonely conservatives find each other discreetly. But the app leaked its database of users on launch day, a report said Monday. With the slogan "Make America Date Again," the app targets the "American-based singles community connecting lovers, ...
Facebook says 'view as' data breach affected 29 million users; Japan launches probe
Cyberattackers stole data from 29 million Facebook accounts using an automated program that moved from one friend to the next, Facebook announced on Friday, as the social media company said its largest-ever data theft hit fewer than the 50 million profiles it initially reported. The ...
The remarkable technique used to identify the suspected "Golden State Killer" four decades after his crimes — genetic genealogy — could be used to identify half of all Americans from relatives' DNA samples, a new study says. And only a few years from now, the ...
New Zealand's civil rights watchdog has raised concerns over new laws allowing customs officers to demand passwords for electronic devices such as laptops or mobile phones at the border. Failure to comply with the "digital strip search" rules, which came into effect this week, can ...
