Mobile apps are regularly leaking information to third parties, according to research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, and Carnegie-Mellon. The researchers tested 110 popular, free apps – half of them Android and half iOS – to find out which ones share personal, behavioral, and location data with third-party websites. Make that very...

Facebook has announced that it will notify users it suspects are being targeted by nation states and urge them to take extra security precautions. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, explained the new notifications in a 16 October blog post, saying users will only receive the warnings if Facebook has strong evidence suggesting they are...

For the third year running Mozilla’s ‘browser wars’ veteran, Firefox, has burned the world’s favourite browser, Google Chrome, in our trustworthy browser poll. Surprisingly, it also soundly beat the newest entrant to appear in our poll – the post-Snowden privacy poster boy, the Tor browser. The Tor browser, which uses Firefox as its base, is designed to be...

Personal assistants on smartphones – Siri on the iPhone, Google Now on Androids, and Cortana on Windows Phone – allow us to do a lot of things with only a voice command. We can make calls, send text messages, do web searches, and much more. But what if someone else could make your phone do...

We already know that Android handset makers don’t always deliver security updates in a timely way – Google has only recently started issuing regular security updates for its own Nexus devices. But the number of unsecure Android devices out there is truly astonishing, according to research from the UK’s University of Cambridge – 87% of...

It was never about the money, said the man who owned Google.com for 1 minute earlier this month. So when Google reached out last week to discuss a reward for its former Display Specialist and Account Strategist/current MBA candidate Sanmay Ved, he responded with pure altruism – telling the company that he’d rather see the...

Remember Stagefright? It was a security hole, or more accurately a cluster of holes, in Android’s core media-handling library, known as libstagefright. The official name of the buggy library quickly morphed into the media-friendly moniker of the bugs themselves, Stagefright. In operating system terms, a “library” (usually known as a DLL, or dynamic link library,...

Surfing the internet late at night, ex-Google Display Specialist and Account Strategist Sanmay Ved discovered a strange thing – a premium domain name going for just $12. And by premium I don’t mean some new, previously unregistered domain with a catchy name, but, rather, the mother of all domains: Google.com. At around 1:20 AM on...

Let’s say you’ve joined a travel company’s rewards program. In doing so, you handed over your email address. As you plan your next trip, maybe you’ll do a Google search on “non-stop flights to new york,” much to the delight of the advertising-engorged company. If you’re logged in to any Google account, you may very...