Our cat diaries

Privacy concerns tend to seem unimportant and not pressing to many of us in our daily lives. Whenever you see a headline about a celebrity having their career ruined in various ways on the internet, it can be easy to dismiss these events as not relevant to our lifestyles. After all, why would anybody want to attack a random, relatively unimportant person?

It’s widely known that Facebook collects information about its users. Most people seem to be at least tangentially aware that this either is actively happening, or has happened in the past. For many, the details end there. We want to take a look at not only what Facebook does with all this data, but what data they collect in the first place.

We already discussed the dire state of privacy legislation in the past, but that raises the question - is policy surrounding DDoSing similarly dismal?

If you’re on an iDevice and are using Facebook’s in-app browser, you’re going to want to read this. Apparently, the in-app browser provided by Facebook and Instagram tracks everything you do, on any website. That means Meta can track where you go, what you do while you’re there and every tap you make on your phone while you’re doing it.

Recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation in conjunction with the Associated Press broke a story wide open on a piece of software that allows police to surveil citizens like you and me with impunity. Coming off the backs of very similar technology attracting the ire of the FTC, this is not a good look to say the least.

Chinese phone maker Xiaomi has announced that it has found flaws in its phones that could allow a scammer to fake financial transactions without you being aware. Xiaomi is the third largest phone manufacturer after Samsung and Apple with millions of users. The flaw could potentially allow bad actors to take control of the mobile payment system within Xiaomi phones and forge their own for a variety of nefarious purposes.

Kochava, one of the largest and most notorious Data Brokers, is finally being sued by the FTC. The straw that broke the camels back - selling data tracked from phone geolocation. According to the lawsuit, individuals going to “sensitive locations,” including abortion clinics and domestic violence shelters, can be tracked down by anybody with sufficient funds.

The Lazarus Group, attributed to North Korea, has been seen targeting Apple users. Specifically, Apple users with Mac that use either M1 or Intel chipsets.