A new study argues that more than half of Americans could be identified by name if all you had to start with was a sample of their DNA and a few basic facts, such as where they live and how about how old they might be.

Google exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of users of the Google+ social network, though it didn’t find evidence of misuse. The company opted not to disclose the issue this past spring, in part because of fears doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny.

Apple CEO Tim Cook hit out at tech companies that claim more customer data leads to superior products, saying that's a "bunch of bunk." In an exclusive interview with Vice News Tonight that aired Tuesday, Cook did not name any names but appeared to admonish the likes of advertising giants Facebook and Google, which rely on data sharing with third parties. "The narrative that some companies will try to get you to believe is: 'I've got to take all of your data to make my service better.' Well, don't believe them," Cook told Vice.

Facebook says it has not found any evidence "so far" that its attackers accessed third-party sites through Facebook Login. It's a sliver of good news about a massive data breach that the company first disclosed last week. Attackers accessed as many as 50 million accounts in the largest such breach of Facebook's network.

Facebook will soon pull a mobile VPN app called Onavo Protect from Apple’s App Store, after the iPhone maker declared it violated the store’s guidelines on data collection, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Onavo, which began as an Israeli analytics startup focused on helping users monitor their data usage, was acquired by Facebook in 2013. Its VPN provider then became a data collection tool for Facebook to monitor smartphone users’ behavior outside its core apps, helping inform Facebook’s live video strategy, competition from other social apps, and its decision to acquire companies including WhatsApp.

Privacy has always been a key feature and popular selling point for the messaging app WhatsApp. Company co-founder Jan Koum grew up in the Soviet Union under heavy government surveillance, and he promised to keep user data protected after Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014. Now, with Koum on the way out, it may be time to ditch WhatsApp before that promise leaves with him.

Mark Zuckerberg isn't planning to fire himself. At least, not at the moment. During an interview with Recode's Kara Swisher published Wednesday, the Facebook CEO touched on Russians interfering with US elections, misinformation, data breaches, the company's business model and more. When asked by Swisher who's to blame for the Cambridge Analytica scandal and related data misuse, Zuckerberg said he "designed the platform, so if someone's going to get fired for this, it should be me." Swisher followed up by asking if he was going to fire himself. "Not on this podcast right now," he said.

For months, police across the country have been using a device called a GrayKey to unlock dormant iPhones, using an undisclosed technique to sidestep Apple’s default disk encryption. The devices are currently in use in at least five states and five federal agencies, seen as a breakthrough in collecting evidence from encrypted devices.

Google is being sued in the high court for as much as £3.2bn for the alleged “clandestine tracking and collation” of personal information from 4.4 million iPhone users in the UK. The collective action is being led by former Which? director Richard Lloyd over claims Google bypassed the privacy settings of Apple’s Safari browser on iPhones between August 2011 and February 2012 in order to divide people into categories for advertisers.

Facebook scans the contents of messages that people send each other on its Messenger app blocking any that contravene its guidelines, it has emerged. The scandal-hit firm, still reeling from revelations surrounding Cambridge Analytica, checks images and texts to ensure they are in line with its community standards. While the intentions behind the practice may be well-meaning, the news is likely to add to users' concerns over what the social network knows about them.

In November 2017, a gunman entered a church in Sutherland Springs in Texas, where he killed 26 people and wounded 20 others. He escaped in his car, with police and residents in hot pursuit, before losing control of the vehicle and flipping it into a ditch. When the police got to the car, he was dead. The episode is horrifying enough without its unsettling epilogue. In the course of their investigations, the FBI reportedly pressed the gunman’s finger to the fingerprint-recognition feature on his iPhone in an attempt to unlock it.

Facebook is not a privacy company; it’s Big Brother on PCP. It does not want to anonymize and protect you; it wants to drain you of your privacy, sucking up every bit of personal data. You should resist the urge to let it, at every turn. There’s a new menu item in the Facebook app, first reported by TechCrunch on Monday, labeled “Protect.” Clicking it will send you to the App Store and prompt you to download a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service called Onavo.

Hundreds of the world’s top websites routinely track a user’s every keystroke, mouse movement and input into a web form – even before it’s submitted or later abandoned, according to the results of a study from researchers at Princeton University.

USB data recovery guide: A USB flash drive stores all of its data in the memory which is similar to a hard drive. The operating system can fetch all this data when required to be accessed or used. There can also be various issues that may turn your all USB drive data inaccessible. Like, if the drive is unmounted improperly from the USB port then it can lead to the data corruption. Another cause for the stores’ data corruption can also be any type of invalid data in the (MBR) Master Boot Record / (PBR) Partition Boot Record / Directory structure on that USB drive.

On a recent Thursday, I waited for an email that was supposed to contain every personal detail the internet knows about me. The message would be from an online data broker — a company that collects and sells information that many people would hope is private. This includes browsing history, online purchases, and any information about you that’s publicly available: property records, court cases, marital status, social-media connections, and more. Facebook collaborates with data brokers for targeting advertisements.

Consumer privacy advocates are concerned after the U.S. Senate on Thursday passed a resolution that will roll back privacy rules the Federal Communications Commission approved last year, but the two largest Alaska-based telecommunications companies say their customers won't be affected. A win for the telecommunications industry, the measure would undo rules not yet in effect that would have provided "heightened protection for sensitive consumer information" and require...

There are many options you have in how to respond to a ransomware threat. It all depends on your risk appetite.

Using this new data storage technique, you could fit the entire Library of Congress on a cube smaller than a dust mite—or the size of George Washington's pupil on a one dollar bill. A team of nanoscientists led by Sander Otte at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has just unveiled the densest method ever developed to store re-writable digital data. By scooting around individual chlorine atoms on a flat sheet of copper, the scientists could write a 1 kilobyte message at 500 terabits per square inch.

Apple, like practically every mega-corporation, wants to know as much as possible about its customers. But it’s also marketed itself as Silicon Valley’s privacy champion, one that—unlike so many of its advertising-driven competitors—wants to know as little as possible about you. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the company has now publicly boasted about its work in an obscure branch of mathematics that deals with exactly that paradox.

If you back up your photos on optical disks or storage drives, there’s a good chance your data won’t last as long as you do due to things known as “disc rot” and “data rot“. But what if you want to ensure that your precious photos live longer than you? Good news: a new “eternal” storage technology may be on the horizon. Scientists have created nanostructured glass discs that can storage digital data for billions of years.