Radio Shack’s assets are now up for sale in a bankruptcy auction. And those assets include customer names, email addresses and phone numbers.
Your Bitemaster is no lawyer, but, generally, a bankruptcy judge can void all contracts undertaken by the debtor. So if your PII isn’t protected by law, it’s probably going to the highest bidder.
RadioShack could sell customer info in bankruptcy auction – NY Daily News.
In April 2014, Tim Libert, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, custom-built software called webXray to analyze the top 50 search results for nearly 2,000 common diseases (over 80,000 pages total). He found the results startling: a full 91 percent of the pages made what are known as third-party requests to outside companies. That means when you search for “cold sores,” for instance, and click the highly ranked “Cold Sores Topic Overview WebMD” link, the website is passing your request for information about the disease along to one or more (and often many, many more) other corporations.
Looking Up Symptoms Online? These Companies Are Tracking You | Motherboard.
Verizon tracks you using their secret cookies but doesn’t want the government to be able to subpoena their offshore servers which store data from their US customers.
What gives?
Maybe they’re angling for Kim Dotcom’s or Dread Pirate Robert’s business.
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@threatpost: #Government Demands for @Verizon Customer Data Drop – http://t.co/VOXVSerw6S
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Online ad company Turn uses tracking cookies that come back to life after Verizon users have deleted them. Turn’s services are used by everyone from Google to Facebook.
If you’re surprised, you haven’t been reading Biteme close enough. Like Google tricks Internet Explorer into accepting tracking cookies and We’re boned: Google bypassed Apple Safari privacy.
Hat tip to MrMild.
Zombie Cookie: The Tracking Cookie That You Can’t Kill – ProPublica.
NY Presbyterian is offering a new service to families of people who die in their facility. Thanks to recent technological advances, a family can now watch their loved one’s death throes on television. No DVD player is needed because it will be shown on regular broadcast TV.
‘I saw my husband die’: TV show featuring Dr. Oz broadcast patient’s death without permission.
If you want the new stronger encryption being added to iPhones, Obama’s Department of Justice considers you a criminal. Gone is the presumption that ordinary citizens should be free from government snooping and gone is the requirement of a warrant. If you’re not a crook, just hand over all your data to the gummint and trust that they won’t misuse it.
Beefed up iPhone crypto will lead to a child dying, DOJ warned Apple execs | Ars Technica.
You know what Scientology does to its opponents: it declares them “fair game” and uses investigations, character assassination, legal action and infiltration to eventually destroy them.
That’s what Uber senior vice president Emil Michael wants to do to journalists who write unflattering things about his company. According to BuzzFeed, Michael “. . . suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.”
Creepy, huh? But Uber apparently is even creepier than that, sometimes using the travel logs of their journalist customers to spy on them.
In fact, the general manager of Uber NYC accessed the profile of a BuzzFeed News reporter, Johana Bhuiyan, to make points in the course of a discussion of Uber policies. At no point in the email exchanges did she give him permission to do so.”
Sure, all the New Technology companies spy on you to make money. But now you have to worry that they’re spying on you to fuck you over.
Several cellphone providers have been tracking their users’ Internet activities by adding “supercookies” to cellphone transmissions. The providers say that it’s just for normal business purposes, but the truth is that the trove of data they’re amassing is of enormous value to law enforcement in their struggle to stay ahead of the bad guys.
Because of the negative publicity that followed the disclosure of this cellphone tracking, as well as pressure from self-appointed Internet watchdogs like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AT&T has caved and is no longer collecting the data.
The good news is that the Department of Justice has stepped into the breach. The DOJ now has a fleet of airplanes that act as decoy cell towers. Say you use Verizon, and the DOJ wants to see what you’re up to — they have their planes send out the same signals that real Verizon towers use, so that your phone connects to their network instead of Verizon’s. That way, the government can capture everything you do on your phone.
As for privacy, the government assures us that, if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.
AT&T stops adding Web tracking codes on cellphones | The Augusta Chronicle.
The U.S. Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of ordinary Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations.
Extensive U.S. mail monitoring revealed | Dallas Morning News.
FBI director James Comey is concerned that Apple and Google are making phones that cannot be searched by the government.
Let me join with the Founding Fathers in telling the Director to Bite me! If he wants to know what I’m doing with my phone, he can get a warrant, just like the Constitution provides.
FBI: new Apple, Google phones too secure, could put users ‘beyond the law’ – Yahoo News.