LinkLocker

This week on Badly Handled Data Breach Theater, it's Uber in the hotseat. New CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who seems to have inherited from Noted Dirtbag Travis Kalanick the business equivalent of a flaming used diaper, reveals (ta-da!) in a solemn blog post that personal information belonging to 57 million Uber customers was stolen in 2016 by "two individuals outside the company." Stolen data includes names, email addresses, and mobile phone numbers. Oh, and also: they knew this a year ago and never bothered to ...

Traveling is usually a nerve-wracking experience, and it becomes even more so when you stop to think about all of the various ways in which your privacy is either compromised or at risk while you're en route from one city to another. That airport WiFi looks pretty attractive until you realize that any rando can be sitting in the terminal running a honeypot network called "Free Airprot WiFi" [sic] on his laptop, ready to scrape your data (or to completely pwn you) the second you jump on. TSA would just love to see what you've been up to on Facebook, particularly if you're headed to Bahrain. That USB charging station? Who know where that thing has been? The whole thing is a mess, but there are few things you can do to avoid these issues.

I began donating to the ACLU last November 9, and I remain happy with that decision. They are currently bringing the Carpenter v. U.S. case to the Supreme Court, and the way this case turns out could have a major impact on the privacy of all Americans who have cellular phones¹. At issue, roughly speaking, is the fact that U.S. government—as well as state and local law enforcement agencies—are currently able to access the location data generated by your cellular ...

In case you haven't heard, one of the dopiest screwups in tech history stumbled stupidly into the news yesterday. Andy Rubin's new hardware startup, Essential, has massively borked what should be a relatively simple order fulfillment process in shipping their new smartphone. What happened is just so unimaginably wrong in so many ways. There simply are not enough facepalm memes in the world to express the magnitude of imbecility on display in this debacle. Let's walk through what happened. Perhaps other companies ...

If you haven't yet heard, the Department of Justice has served a search warrant to hosting provider Dreamhost, in which they demand a massive amount of data about disruptj20.org—a site which helped organize protestors against the President's inauguration in January. These sorts of requests are not at all uncommon, but in this case the DOJ wants info about the site's visitors. What info? Pretty much all info. If you visited that site for any reason, the DOJ wants to know ...