Educational

Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google's owner), has signed a deal with the Canadian city of Toronto to redevelop the brownfield Quayside waterfront district and turn it into a technology hub. The deal raises three sets of issues. First (The Guardian) is the essential privatisation of

Researchers at Princeton University have shown that a vulnerability identified 11 years ago in the password managers built into web browsers can be exploited to allow third parties to track users across more than a thousand websites. The attack depends on the managers' autofill capability, and works

Scientists at MIT have created an algorithm called "EQ Radio" that detects and measures individual heartbeats and therefore individuals' emotions by bouncing radio frequency signals - such as ordinary wifi- off of people. The algorithm works the same as an electrocardiogram but needs no leads to be

A federal class-action lawsuit filed in California in July 2017 alleges that in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and without parental permission, the Walt Disney Company secretly collects personal information about some of its youngest customers and shares it

Every Tesla vehicle is a mobile data collector incorporating built-in sensors that constantly record information about the car's environment and the way the driver navigates through it. The result is to inspire established automakers such as General Motors, Volkswagen, and Nissan-Renault to follow

After investigation, the UK's privacy regulatory, the Information Commissioner's Office has found that two small sections of the written scripts used by Blue Telecoms, a marketing firm that made calls on behalf of the Conservative Party during the 2017 general election, crossed the line from

The French data protection regulator, the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), has issued a formal notice to Genesis Industries Limited, the maker of the connected toys My Friend Cayla and I-QUE. Genesis has two months to bring the toys into compliance with data protection

Using anonymised data GPS data from mobile devices, primarily smart phones, SafeGraph concluded that the crowds attending the US presidential inauguration in January 2016 make significantly less money than attendees of the Women's March two months later. The income level estimates were made possible

Facebook and Twitter have advised Damian Collins, the chair of the UK Parliament's digital, culture, media, and sport committee, that the companies will hand over some information relating to the rearch of Russia-backed posts during the EU referendum. Facebook has already given the US Senate similar

In 2017, Grindr, which at the time was available in 192 countries, began implementing new privacyimplementing new privacy protection measures in order to help protect its users in anti-gay countries such as those in the Middle East and Africa. Among them: users will be able to to change the Grindr

Recognising that many parents will be considering purchasing connected toys and other devices for their children, for Christmas 2017 the UK's Information Commissioner's Office issued a list of 12 guidelines for assessing products before purchasing. These include: research the product's security

A recent study from the Yale Privacy lab and Exodus Privacy founds dozens of invasive trackers hidden in common Android apps. However, the method the researchers used, which involved writing code to expose the internal workings of the devices they tested, is legally barred under the US Digital

Our usual image of online advertising is that we are one of millions whose data is being examined by a large, remote organisation - a government or major company. Research from the University of Washington has found that anyone equipped with time, determination, and a relatively small budget of $1

Some of the Google Home Mini units distributed before release to the tech press and at "Made By Google" events had a defective touch panel. The devices were meant to turn on recording only when the owner woke it up with "OK, Google" or applied a long press to the centre of the touch panels. Instead

Widespread controversy resulted when users discovered in April 2017 that the little-known data company Slice Intelligence was passing anonymised data derived from scanning users' email inboxes to the ride-hailing company Uber. The story illustrates both the power of anonymous data and the complex

Websites have long used third-party analytics scripts to collect information about how visitors use their sites. In November 2017, researchers at Princeton found that an increasing number of sites use "session replay" scripts that collect every action the user performs while on the site, including