Tag Archive for: Phone

ACLU: NSA phone dragnet should be killed not amended

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The U.S. Congress should kill the section of the Patriot Act that has allowed the National Security Agency to collect millions of phone records from the nation’s residents, instead of trying to amend it, a civil liberties advocate said Friday.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the NSA to collect phone records, business records and any other “tangible things” related to an anti-terrorism investigation, expires in June, and lawmakers should let it die, said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted to approve a bill to amend that section of the anti-terrorism law. The USA Freedom Act would end the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. phone records by narrowing the scope of the agency’s searches, backers of the bill said.

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Network World Security

FTC sanctions phone location tracking company for not allowing customer opt-out

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Nomi has been ordered to tidy up its business practices as part of a settlement with the FTC over its tracking of retail customers’ smartphones.
Naked Security – Sophos

A third of Americans have changed online and phone behaviours post-Snowden

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Edward Snowden has been heard, and his words are having at least some effect. True, a minority have changed to better protect their privacy, but the more people know, the more likely they are to change.
Naked Security – Sophos

Android malware fakes phone shutdown to steal data

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Next time you turn off your Android phone, you might want take the battery out just to be certain.

Security vendor AVG has spotted a malicious program that fakes the sequence a user sees when they shut off their phone, giving it freedom to move around on the device and steal data.

When someone presses the power button on a device, a fake dialog box is shown. The malware then mimics the shutdown animation and appears to be off, AVG’s mobile malware research team said in a blog post.

“Although the screen is black, it is still on,” they said. “While the phone is in this state, the malware can make outgoing calls, take pictures and perform many other tasks without notifying the user.”

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Network World Security