Author: Delray Frierson

In a recent alarming incident, the massive data location broker Gravy Analytics was breached. Data brokers are companies that collect, package, and sell personal information without individuals’ knowledge or consent. The data collected by these brokers can include sensitive details such as location, financial records, phone numbers, email addresses, and, in some cases, passwords. This info is often sold to third parties, including advertisers, marketers, and even law enforcement agencies, raising serious privacy concerns. This situation really highlights the growing threat posed by data brokers. Just last year National Public Data had an intrusion where many users’ passwords and data…

In a recent study by Ketch Kloud, a data privacy management company, only 12 percent of major US websites honor privacy settings set by users. These findings were gathered by conducting an automated sweep of 134 major US websites. They used browser emulation to see the extent of tracking, data collection, and user profiling on these websites and focused on two states; when a user opts in vs. opts out of data tracking and collection.  So what did they find? 55 percent of these trackers are geared toward marketing, advertising, and personalization mapping. 40% of the trackers collecting this data…

Apple has had its share of privacy concerns over the years, with users reporting that their phones are listening to them. Primarily, phone owners are getting advertisements when they have just had a conversation on the subject. Those people have a little vindication now, as just recently, Apple settled to pay the class action lawsuit Lopez v. Apple for violating customer data and privacy in 20191. This lawsuit focused on Apple releasing Siri (Apple’s proprietary assistant software ) conversations to third-party contractors to better assist in improvements to the software. Apparently, these were activated accidentally due to misinterpreted trigger words…