Sarah Meyer76 posts 0 comments

It’s been a bad year for Facebook – and a worse one for its users. However – many of the problems at the social media company are systemic – and the product of its own attitude to harnessing the data of users to run targeted ad campaigns.

Most people would be rightly excited by the prospect of artificial intelligence automating all facets of our lives. But with machines' increasing ability to mine personal data, collate that data and draw conclusions about behavior, is the sacrifice of privacy and control something people would be willing to give up?

Search engines provide an indispensable service but there is a data privacy tradeoff. The cost is a certain level of intrusion into our lives by gathering data about our online habits and monetizing that data.

Privacy risks inherent in the use of biometric identification are extreme. In the event of a data breach, you cannot reissue an iris or a fingerprint. As technologies become more advanced and surveillance on city streets the norm who will draw the line at just what level of invasive monitoring is permissible?

Increasing Internet surveillance with new set of rules saw Internet authorities in China clenching an iron fist requiring tech companies to identify the real registered names of users and to record user activities.

Marriott has put half a billion guest at risk in one of the largest data breach to date. The scope of the data breach is not only startling due to the numbers of guests that have been affected, it is the sheer amount of time since 2014 that the hackers had had access to the data.

LinkedIn accused of gathering 18 million email addresses of non-users and using those addresses for targeted Facebook advertising. And the Irish Data Protection Commissioner got a bit irate – and rightly so.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee argues that nothing short of a ‘revolution’ will stem abuse of the Internet and a new Internet Charter, a new Magna Carta, is essential to force tech giants to take concrete action to reinvent how the Internet is monetized and regulated.

New vehicle hacking threat exploits Bluetooth connectivity and targets a car’s infotainment system to access stored contacts, call logs, text logs, and in some instances even full text messages without the user being aware.

Almost 18 months since the 2017 massive outbreak, the WannaCry ransomware remains a cyber threat based on recent research from Kaspersky Labs showing 75,000 infections over the last three months.