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In July 2018, Facebook announced it was investigating whether the Boston-based company Crimson Hexagon had violated the company's policies on surveillance. Crimson Hexagon markets itself as offering "consumer insights". Its customers include a Russian non-profit with ties to the Kremlin, and multiple US government agencies. After pressure from civil liberties groups, Facebook put a policy in place in March 2017 barring the use of members' data for the purposes of government surveillance.…
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In July 2018 the three-year-old payment system Revolut notified the UK's National Crime Agency and the Financial Conduct Authority that it had found evidence of money laundering on its system. From its beginnings as a prepaid credit card operator, Revolut had branched out into small business services and cryptocurrencies. Former employees suggest that although the company recently participated in an industry-wide review of money laundering checks and was in compliance with the EU's PSD2, its…
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In November 2018, HSBC announced a serious data breach in its US business between October 4 and 14, when fraudsters used credential stuffing to gain access to detailed account information relating to about 1% of its 1.4 million US customers. HSBC said that in response it had strengthened its login and authentication processes and implemented additional layers of security. The bank gave affected customers a year's credit monitoring and identity fraud protection, and reminded customers to use…
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In June 2018 Facebook announced it would install new controls to improve members' understanding of how companies targeted them with advertising, including letting them know if a data broker supplied the information. This was the second update to the company's policies in 2018; in March it attempted to ban the use of data brokers but pulled back when advertisers threatened to pull their business.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-privacy-broker/facebook-releases-new-privacy-safeguards-…
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In 2018, experiments showed that despite the company's denials, ads could be targeted at specific Facebook users via information that the users had never given Facebook, such as phone numbers.
The reason: Facebook allows advertisers to upload their own lists of phone numbers of email addresses, and the service will use them to put ads in front of users associated with those details. The company also uses information supplied for security purposes, including phone numbers provided for two-…
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In 2018, economists Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business showed that national divisions are so entrenched that details of what Americans buy, do, and watch can be used to predict, sometimes with more than 90% accuracy, their politics, race, income, education, and gender. In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economists taught machine algorithms to detect patterns in decades of responses to three long-running…
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In 2018, the Berlin-based researcher Hang Do Thi Duc concluded after analysing more than 200 million public transactions made in 2017 that anyone can track the purchase history of a user of the peer-to-peer payment app Venmo. By accessing the data via an open API, Do Thi Duc was able to view the names, transaction dates, and messages sent with payment for all users who hadn't changed their settings to private. Venmo's default setting is "public", and does not clearly highlight how to change it…
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A flaw in the official 2018 UK Conservative Party conference app granted both read and write access to the private data of senior party members, including cabinet ministers, to anyone who logged in by second-guessing the email address they used to sign into the app. Twitter users claimed that one leading politician, Boris Johnson, had his avatar briefly replaced by a pornographic image, while another, Michael Gove, had his replaced by that of media magnate Rupert Murdoch. The app was…
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In September 2017, the UN Capital Development Fund, the UN Development Programme, and the non-profit San Francisco-based startup Kiva, which has worked for 13 years as a crowd-funded microlending platform announced a joint initiative to open up financial services to the 20% of the Sierra Leone population - 7 million citizens - who have no credit history or proof of formal identity and are therefore unable to start businesses, raise loans, or generally access mainstream financial services. The…
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The common reporting standard brought in by the UK's HMRC in 2018 require tax authorities to automatically exchange information on millions of citizens living abroad. In response, an EU citizen domiciled in Italy who formerly lived in the UK and maintains a UK bank account, filed a complaint with the UK's data protection regulator arguing that sharing this data exposed her to risk of cyber hacking or accidental leaks and therefore violates GDPR. Developed by the OECD, the common reporting…
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In 2018, based on an analysis of 270,000 purchases between October 2015 and December 2016 on a German ecommerce site that sells furniture on credit, researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research found that variables such as the type of device could be used to estimate the likelihood that a purchaser would default. The difference in rates of default between users of iOS and Android was about the same as the difference between a median FICO credit score and the 80th percentile of FICO…
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In 2017, Britain's' two biggest supermarkets, Tesco and Sainsbury's, which jointly cover 45% of the UK's grocery market, announced they would offer discounts on car and home insurance based on customers' shopping habits. For example, based on data from its Nectar card loyalty scheme, Sainsbury's associates reliable, predictable patterns of visits to stores with safer and more cautious driving, and therefore offers those individuals cheaper insurance. For some products, Sainsbury's also mines…
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In January 2019, it was discovered that the HIV-positive status of 14,200 people in Singapore, as well as their identification numbers and contact details, had been leaked online. According to a statement of the Ministry of Health, records leaked include 5,400 Singaporeans diagnosed as HIV-positive before January 2013, and 8,800 foreigners diagnosed before December 2011. Patient names, identification numbers, phone numbers, addresses, HIV test results and medical information was included in the…