Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Have your tax returns, Nest videos, and medical info been made public?
When we use browsers to make medical appointments, share tax returns with accountants, or access corporate intranets, we usually trust that the pages we access will remain private. DataSpii, a newly documented privacy issue in which millions of people's browsing histories have been collected and exposed, shows just how much about us is revealed when that assumption is turned on its head.
DataSpii begins with browser extensions—available mostly for Chrome but in more limited cases for Firefox as well—that, by Google's account, had as many as 4.1 million users. These extensions collected the URLs, webpage titles, and in some cases the embedded hyperlinks of every page that the browser user visited. Most of these collected Web histories were then published by a fee-based service called Nacho Analytics, which markets itself as "God mode for the Internet" and uses the tag line "See Anyone's Analytics Account."
[...] According to the researcher who discovered and extensively documented the problem, this non-stop flow of sensitive data over the past seven months has resulted in the publication of links to:
- Home and business surveillance videos hosted on Nest and other security services
- Tax returns, billing invoices, business documents, and presentation slides posted to, or hosted on, Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit.com, and other online services
- Vehicle identification numbers of recently bought automobiles, along with the names and addresses of the buyers
- Patient names, the doctors they visited, and other details listed by DrChrono, a patient care cloud platform that contracts with medical services
- Travel itineraries hosted on Priceline, Booking.com, and airline websites
- Facebook Messenger attachments and Facebook photos, even when the photos were set to be private.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 20 2019, @11:13PM (4 children)
What are you so upset about then? You sure you ain't a terraist or somethin'?
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday July 21 2019, @12:14AM
At the very least it's voyeurism. 'nuff said.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @08:19AM (2 children)
The Democratic Party before around the middle of the 1960s was a very different animal than it is today. Around the 1960s was the Southern Strategy [rationalwiki.org] that just about completely realigned the parties. Before then, the Republican Party was still thought of as the party of Abraham Lincoln and the "War of the Northern Aggression", but after prominent Democrats like Kennedy and even more so Johnson began to advocate civil rights, a lot of the southern Democrats that once formed the core of the party defected to the Republicans. The 1964 election was perhaps the turning point, as it saw Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater win five states in the Deep South, a traditionally Democratic bulwark, and oddly enough, apart from his own home state of Arizona, those were the only states he won. And Malcolm X also had this to say about Goldwater:
Malcolm X did not live to see the Southern Strategy come to its full completion in the 1968 and 1972 elections, at the time he died in 1965 it was just getting started.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 21 2019, @08:51AM (1 child)
Yeah, I keep hearing that version of history. "Complete realignment" and all that. But, what do you see when you look past all the smoke and mirrors? You see D's willing to pay billions, to keep Darkie on the plantation, and the R's wanting to bring the black man into the work force, where he can be productive.
Discounting Hollywood celebs, and know-nothing singers, it appears that successful black people prefer the R strategy over being kept on the plantation. The masses still believe that bullshit about reparations, and the country owes them something (or everything?).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 23 2019, @11:27PM
But having grown up around strongly R family members, the majority of the conservative ones espoused phrenology and similar ideological views, used mexicans, blacks, russians and others as cheap often illegal labor to undercut 'legitimate' paid labor, and generally sided strongly with the aforementioned flip in party loyalties based on racial, economic, social, and religious politics.
(Score: 4, Informative) by deimtee on Sunday July 21 2019, @03:40AM (1 child)
A probably incomplete list from TFA of the extensions spying on you:
Fairshare Unlock
SpeakIt!
Hover Zoom
PanelMeasurement
Super Zoom
SaveFrom.net Helper
Branded Surveys
Panel Community Surveys
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 21 2019, @09:01AM
When I install, or manage, extensions into my browsers, I'm sure that I always get a warning. Something to the effect that "Extension Blahblah will have access to all of your browsing, including logins, blah blah blah. Are you sure you want to install Extension Blahblah?"
Most of the time, I'm NOT sure. Truth be told, I'm never really really sure. But, I do permit extensions from EFF, and a small handful of groups that I mostly trust.
Will I install an extension written by some individual whom I have never heard of, and have no idea what he's all about? Just because it has a cool name, maybe some cool artwork on the home page, and Author X says that his extension is cool? Nope. All of my extensions come from places and people that have earned some measure of trust and respect OVER TIME. There is history to look at. There are people to talk to. Comments, reviews, complaints, and bug reports to look at. The extensions I choose to use are developed, for the most part, in the *nix fashion.
I live as much as possible outside the Cathedral, in the Bazaar. I simply won't trust Joe Blow not to track me, and to use my data for profit, and/or to use my data against me.
TLDR: every extension has the potential to be used against your best interests. Choose wisely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @12:16PM (1 child)
The morons dont give a fuck about privacy to begin with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @05:36PM
and anyone who installs slaveware extensions will be treated like a slave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @02:00PM
whats with all the hubba hubba with tracking?
every official android comes with a totally unremovable ADVERTISMENT TRACKING ID straight outtada box!
it's totally official and sanctioned and everything. right there. in the shiiny box you get after forking over your hard earned monies.
sure, sure, you can "reset" that number "somewhere" in the very logically nested sub sub suuuub menu but who's to know if
click on "reset" doesnt also send a little packet that says " number 1234 has been reset on the user DISPLAY and is now 5678”, lol.