Educational

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

In 2018 industry insiders revealed that the gambling industry was increasingly turning to data analytics and AI to personalise their services and predict and manipulate consumer response in order to keep gamblers hooked. Based on profiles assembled by examining every click, page view, and

Although the US rejected a "National Data Center" approach in 1966, eventually instead passing the 1974 Privacy Act, in 2018 the House of Representatives proposed a national database of all 40 million recipients of benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as

Three months after the 2018 discovery that Google was working on Project Maven, a military pilot program intended to speed up analysis of drone footage by automating classification of images of people and objects, dozens of Google employees resigned in protest. Among their complaints: Google

Rising suspicion of benefits claimants in the UK led by 2018 to the Department of Work and Pensions' adoption of numerous surveillance tactics, including using social media postings, gym memberships, airport footage, and surveillance video from public buildings including supermarkets, to build cases

During 2018, when US president Donald Trump operated a policy under which immigration officers separated families arriving at the border without documentation, there were a number of suggestions for using genetic testing to verify family relationships in the interests of reuniting them. After

In July 2018 Walmart filed a patent on a system of sensors that would gather conversations between cashiers and customers, the rattle of bags, and other audio data to monitor employee performance. Earlier in 2018, Amazon was awarded a patent on a wristaband that would monitor and guide workers in

The 2017 hack of the shipping company A.P. Møller-Maersk, which manages 800 seafaring vessels and 76 ports that handle nearly a fifth of the world's shipping capacity, required an emergency shutdown of the company's entire IT system, including its phones. Maersk was a victim of NotPetya, the most

In 2018, the Paris prosecutor's office opened a preliminary inquiry after the lawyer Pierre Farge accused a Bercy specialist intelligence branch of the tax authorities of hacking his firm's database to access information covered by professional confidentiality. The case serves to illustrate the

In late 2018, after apps like Strava and Polar Flow exposed the movements of staff around military bases, the US Department of Defense banned military troops and other workers at sensitive sites from using fitness trackers and other apps that could reveal their users' location. Military leaders will

At the 2018 DefCon security conference, a researcher from the security firm Nuix presented the discovery that body cameras from five different manufacturers shoe cameras are in use by US law enforcement are vulnerable to remote digital attacks, some of which could manipulate footage so it could not

In 2018, documents filed in a court case showed that a few days before the 2017 inauguration of US president Donald Trump - timing that may have been a coincidence - two Romanian hackers took over 123 of the police department's 187 surveillance cameras in Washington, DC with the intention of using

As the use of non-cash payment mechanisms continued to increase over the course of 2018, Europe's central banks began warning that phasing out cash poses a serious threat to the financial system, as too-heavy reliance on digital payments exposes countries to the potential for catastrophic failure