Google says it’ll start automatically deleting visits to abortion clinics, domestic violence shelters, weight loss clinics, and other potentially sensitive locations from users’ location histories in the coming weeks. In a blog post on Friday, the company says that the deletion will happen “soon after” the visit, once its systems have identified that a trip was made to one of the locations.

There are many legitimate uses of facial recognition, however left unregulated, the technology also poses a real threat.

Simple privacy precautions anyone can take when researching or arranging an abortion in the United States.

Even the government finds the software useful

Concerns have been raised over the privacy of technology, such as period tracking apps, and whether their data could be collected and potentially used to incriminate women after the US Supreme Court voted to overturn the landmark Roe V Wade case. The ruling has ended constitutional protection for access to abortions in the US, triggering protests from coast to coast.

The Supreme Court on Friday overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that safeguarded access to abortion across the US. The decision Friday promoted renewed fears from digital privacy advocates who fear that online activity will be used against people who seek abortion care or advocate for abortion access in states where it becomes illegal.

Instagram is testing out new ways to verify users' ages, including scanning their faces. The company announced the trial, which began on June 23 and is currently only being rolled out in the US, in a blog post. The trial is focused on users who try to change their age on the app from under 18 to over 18. Those users have three ways to verify their age: upload a photo of their ID, ask three mutual friends verify their age, or record a video selfie.

When someone gets an abortion, they may decide not to share information with friends and family members. But chances are their smartphone knows. The Supreme Court decision to effectively overturn the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade turns years of warnings about digital surveillance into a pressing reality in many states. Suddenly, Google searches, location information, period-tracking apps and other data could be used as evidence of a crime.

Starting Tuesday, Microsoft announced new customers can no longer use its features to read emotions and will have to apply for approval to use its other facial recognition tools.

Experts anticipate a "brutal battle" between Apple and global regulators amid concerns about how the company may "exaggerate" its privacy and security claims for commercial gain and curtail interoperability to keep users locked into a "walled garden."

Private information from TikTok users in the United States may have been accessed in China, according to a report Friday.

Australia's leading consumer advocacy group has raised serious concerns about major retailers

The doctor will sell you now. Your intimate health information may not be as private as you think if you don’t look carefully at the forms you sign at the doctor’s office. There’s a burgeoning business in harvesting our patient data to target us with ultra-personalized ads. Patients who think medical information should come from a doctor — rather than a pharmaceutical marketing department — might not like that.

A US-based woman has been accused of killing a man after following him to the bar. The woman reportedly followed the man, who she claimed was her boyfriend, to the bar and ran over him with her car. The woman used an Apple AirTag to track her boyfriend’s movements. She accused him of cheating and then ran over him with her car in a fit of rage. Apple AirTag is a very capable device which can be used to track lost items. However, ever since the device was launched, it has been misused on countless occasions. People have used it to illegally track their partners.

Apps are spying on our kids at a scale that should shock you.

Google. Amazon. Facebook. Apple. We live within the digital worlds they have created, and increasingly there’s little chance of escape. They know our personalities. They record whether we are impulsive or prone to anxiety. They understand how we respond to sad stories and violent images. And they use this power, which comes from the relentless mining of our personal data all day, every day, to manipulate and addict us.

Last week, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) slapped a £7.5m fine on a smallish tech company called Clearview AI for “using images of people in the UK, and elsewhere, that were collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition”. The ICO also issued an enforcement notice, ordering the company to stop obtaining and using the personal data of UK residents that is publicly available on the internet and to delete the data of UK residents from its systems.

A considerable class-action lawsuit against Google has been resolved.

"You can’t spy on your customers just because it fits in your marketing strategy," British Columbia's privacy commissioner said of Tim Hortons.

Some state privacy laws use wording written by tech companies and their lobbyists, says a new report today. A formerly Apple-backed lobbying group has previously been cited as pushing for weaker privacy protection based on this wording. Tech giants are aiming to push through weak privacy legislation in order to fend off more meaningful requirements, […]