The unique nature of biometrics is also its flaw. Biometric data might provide a way to identify people with a high degree of accuracy but once it is stolen there is nothing you can do to make it secure again. Of course, if your fingerprint is stolen you could always use another finger, but you could only do this 10 times.
Facebook’s decision to rebrand its Instagram and WhatsApp apps as part of the Facebook empire, seems ironically well-timed as the…
Faceboook-owned Instagram has terminated its relationship with a marketing company called Hyp3r after it was found that the company was ignoring privacy rules and collecting user data it wasn’t supposed to have. What makes this worse is that the company was listed as a preferred Facebook Marketing Partner for the past year.
The explosive popularity of YOLO has led to warnings of the same problem that led to Yik Yak’s shutdown, namely that its anonymity could lead to cyberbullying and hate speech. But in an age of online surveillance and self-censorship, proponents view anonymity as an essential component of privacy and free-speech. And our own research on anonymous online interactions among teenagers in the UK and Ireland has revealed a wider range of interactions that extend beyond the toxic to the benign and even beneficial.
The internet currently accesses about 15 zettabytes of data, and is growing at a rate of 70 terabytes per second. It is an admittedly leaky vessel, and content is constantly going offline to wind up lost forever.
The more tech companies know about their users, the more effectively they can direct them to goods and services that they are likely to buy. The more companies know about their users, the more competitive they are in the market.
Some of the world’s most popular video games track your activity as you play – but they’re not just gathering data for business or marketing purposes. They’re accumulating information about the way you and others play the game, the patterns or habits that lead to success or failure.
As digital technologies facilitate the growth of both new and incumbent organisations, we have started to see the darker sides…
A survey found that consumers’ were very concerned about the protection of their data. As much as 64% of the participants know someone personally whose personal data has been misused. Unwanted marketing was common, suggesting that contact information which was meant to be kept private, had been shared with others.
The Competition Commission last week confirmed what all South Africans have been telling each other for years: the cost of…