Educational

In November 2016, the security contractor Krytowire discovered that cheap Chinese Android phones often include pre-installed software that monitors users' locations, messaging, and contacts, and sends the gathered information to China every 72 hours. Shanghai Adups Technology Company, the Chinese

By July 2018, ten-year-old Twitter had become such a frequent data resource for social scientists that estimates were that anyone who tweeted publicly on the service was part of a dataset somewhere. The ease and low cost of using Twitter have enabled studies such as analysing bot behaviour during

In 2014, a team of four Swedish and Polish researchers began scraping every comment and interaction from 160 public Facebook pages. By two years later, they had collected one of the largest sets of user data ever assembled from the social network; it enabled them to track the behaviour of 368

The US Securities and Exchange Commission announced in April 2018 that it would fine Altaba, formerly known as Yahoo, $35 million for failing to disclose its massive 2014 data breach. Yahoo did not notify the hundreds of millions of customers until the end of 2016, when it was closing its

As part of an ongoing hacker vendetta against surveillance apps installed by abusive partners, in July 2018 a hacker targeted SpyHuman, an India-based company that offers software that monitors Android devices, claiming the software should be taken off the market. Once someone gains physical access

In July 2018, a group of researchers at Northwestern University published the results of two years of studying the collaboration behaviour of tens of thousands of scientists. A controversy rapidly sprang up about the method they used: they had been given access to project folder-related data by the

In April 2018, a researcher at Norway's SINTEF found that the gay-daring app Grindr was sending its 3.6 million users' HIV status and last tested date along with their GPS data, phone ID, and email to two app-optimising companies, Apptimize and Localytics. SINTEF also found that the company was

In March 2018, Trever Feden, the CEO of a property management startup, exposed a flaw in the gay-dating app Grindr that opened access to the location data and other information about its more than 3 million daily users. A website Faden set up allowed Grindr users to see who was blocking them after

In its May 2018 quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Equifax provided its most detailed analysis to date of the company's 2017 data breach. In the US, nearly 147 million people had their names, dates of birth, and/or Social Security numbers stolen; address information was

In September 2018, security researcher Patrick Wardle found that Adware Doctor, the top-selling paid utilities app in the US Mac App Store, was exfiltrating the browser history of anyone who downloaded it and sending it to a developer. Adware Doctor is intended to protect browsers against adware. A

In September 2018, the GuardianApp group of security researchers discovered that dozens of popular news, weather, and fitness iPhone apps that require access to location data sell the data they collect to companies engaged in businesses such as ad targeting. The group found apps such as ASKfm, NOAA

In announcing a data breach in 2018, at first Facebook said 50 million people's data had been accessed, then 30 million - but the data accessed was more sensitive than they thought at first. After investigation, the company explained that it had identified four stages of attack with a different

In July 2018 the UK's Information Commissioner's Office announced it would fine Facebook £500,000, the maximum under the 1998 data protection law, for failing to safeguard its users' information and lacking transparency about how the data was harvested and used by others, specifically Cambridge

In August 2018, Facebook announced it would remove more than 5,000 ad targeting options in order to prevent discrimination. Options specifying the exclusion of people interested in "Passover", "Native American culture", or "Islam" could be used as proxies to allow advertisers to exclude ethnic and

In July 2018, members of the Internal Security Organisation, Uganda's counterintelligence agency, raided South African telecommunications provider MTN's Uganda data centre in Mutundwe. In a letter to the police, MTN said the ISO kidnapped a data manager who worked for the contractor that ran the

The internet provides employers with the opportunity to learn an unprecedented amount about prospective employees by searching social media feeds and other postings. By 2018, DeepSense was taking this a step further by analysing individual's Twitter feeds to predict their personality and employment