“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analyzing it without judicial approval.” So said U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon on Monday, describing the National Security [Keep reading]
Let’s make one thing completely clear: The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under 2 live as much of a “screen-free” life as possible. Not only does the academy discourage giving kids gadgets to stare at, it also discourages screens as background noise, a bit akin to second-hand smoke. [Keep reading]
This is the latest, “It’s spooky, but is it wrong?” privacy story. Stores listen for customers’ cell phones as they probe for WiFi hot-spots, then use that information to observe foot traffic in the store. Perhaps the data is anonymized, but consumers, I’m sure, won’t be comfortable with it. Earlier [Keep reading]
Of course they did. U.S. spies spent years infiltrating virtual gaming worlds like Worlds of Warcraft, “hunting” for terrorists and vacuuming up oodles of data, according to a report Monday by ProPublica, the N.Y. Times, and The Guardian. In fact, there were so make virtual reality spies bumbling around places [Keep reading]
Some UPS shipping customers are experiencing delivery delays, which have come during what might nearly be the worst time of the year — holiday preparations. There’s a cascade of complaints on the UPS Facebook page from consumers complaining about missing packages. Complaints are spilling out onto other web locations, too. [Keep reading]
Here’s the first of several stories I expect to see like this. A security researcher claims he can hack his way into commercial drones and make them take instructions from him. Think of it as a flying botnet. Now there’s an appetizing idea! (H/T to Threatpost and Dennis Fisher for [Keep reading]
The U.K. is aflutter with talk that smartphones might be the reason Britons are having 20 percent less sex than they did a decade ago. The research isn’t as tidy as all that — the 20 percent part is sound, the smartphone part is largely a guess. But then, I’ll [Keep reading]
A small but sizable minority of employers in the most conservative regions of the country use online search tools to screen out job applicants based on religion, a practice that is likely illegal, according to a study published Wednesday by Carnegie Mellon University. The study also found no evidence of [Keep reading]
Angry about that $3,500 “fine” levied against a woman who wrote a negative review against a company? You should really be angry at America’s credit bureaus. Here’s why. You probably saw the story last week about a couple that was hit with a $3,500 “fine” for writing a negative review about [Keep reading]
Home Depot’s Twitter timeline was full of what seemed like endless apologies on Thursday afternoon after the firm tweeted a picture that it now calls a “dumb tweet,” and others are calling racist. “We are deeply sorry for the dumb tweet and have deleted it,” the firm Tweeted dozens of [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan