News and views on the coming collapse
Home » Posts tagged 'iphone'
There is a new and very serious data scandal rising up with iPhones that Apple is being asked to shutdown. There are a number of major companies who are now secretly recording your every move on their iPhone apps without your permission or even your knowledge. They are actually recording every keystroke you make. The list of companies are Abercrombie & Fitch, Air Canada, Expedia, Hollister, Hotels.COM, and Singapore Airlines to mention a few.
According to an investigation by App Analyst, they checked apps created by Glassbox by reviewing their listed customers to see exactly what data was leaving their iPhones and going back to the companies. According to TechCrunch, none of the apps that were checked bothered to tell the client that they were recording their screens or that they were sending the information back to each company. This type of surveillance to see what you might be interested in buying next is EXTREMELYdangerous. This is going way too far and we really do need laws to prohibit this type of data collection. They are capturing everything including your banking details.
What is becoming painfully obvious is you SHOULD NOT use your phone for financial transactions — PERIOD!!!!! Additionally, get a cheap laptop and use that for any financial transactions with NO OTHER apps for movies, travel, or anything. Segregate your financial transactions from the rest of your activities.
On Tuesday, Apple revealed their newest phone. The new line was anticipated by Apple users and is another cult favorite. But many are rightly skeptical of the “FaceID” feature.
FaceID, is a tool that would use facial recognition to identify individuals and unlock their phones for use. Unsurprisingly, this has generated some major anxiety about mass spying and privacy concerns. Retailers already have a desire for facial recognition technology. They want to monitor consumers, and without legally binding terms and Apple could use FaceID to track consumer patterns at its stores or develop and sell data to others.
That seems minor on the surface, but the ramifications could be enormous. It’s also highly possible that police would be able to more easily unlock phones without consent by simply holding an individual’s phone up to his or her face, violating the rights of the person to privacy.
But FaceID should create fear about another form of government surveillance too. And this one is a rights violation of every person on earth: mass scans to identify individuals based on face profiles. Law enforcement is rapidly increasing their use of facial recognition; one in two American adults are already enrolled in a law enforcement facial recognition network, and at least one in four police departments has the capability to run face recognition searches. This could make Apple the target for a new mass surveillance order.
While Facebook has a powerful facial recognition system, it doesn’t maintain the operating systems that control the cameras on phones, tablets, and laptops that stare at us every day. Apple’s new system completely changes that. For the first time, a company will have a facial recognition system with millions of profiles, and the hardware to scan and identify faces throughout the world.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
After the 2013 Snowden revelations, as mainstream technology companies started spreading encryption by putting it in popular consumer products, the wars erupted again. Law enforcement officials, led by FBI Director James Comey, loudly insisted that U.S. companies should build backdoors to break the encryption just for them.
That won’t happen because what these law enforcement officials are asking for isn’t possible (any backdoor can be used by hackers, too) and wouldn’t be effective (because encryption is widely available globally now). They’ve succeeded in slowing the spread of unbreakable encryption by intimidating tech companies that might otherwise be rolling it out faster, but not much else.
Indeed, as almost everyone else acknowledges, unbreakable encryption is here to stay.
Tech privacy advocates continue to remain vigilant about encryption, actively pointing out the inadequacies and impossibilities of the anti-encryption movement, and jumping on any sign of backsliding.
But even as they have stayed focused on defending encryption, the government has been shifting its focus to something else.
The ongoing, very public dispute between Apple and the FBI, in fact, marks a key inflection point — at least as far as the public’s understanding of the issue.
You might say we’re entering the Post-Crypto phase of the Crypto Wars.
Think about it: The more we learn about the FBI’s demand that Apple help it hack into a password-protected iPhone, the more it looks like part of a concerted, long-term effort by the government to find new ways around unbreakable encryption — rather than try to break it.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted last week that “crucial details [of the case] are being obscured by officials.” Specifically, he made the following trenchant points:
Cook wrote that the backdoor, which removes limitations on how often an attacker can incorrectly guess an iPhone passcode, would set a dangerous precedent and “would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession,” even though in this instance, the FBI is seeking to unlock a single iPhone belonging to one of the killers in a 14-victim mass shooting spree in San Bernardino, California, in December.
It’s true that ordering Apple to develop the backdoor will fundamentally undermine iPhone security, as Cook and other digital security advocates have argued. But it’s possible for individual iPhone users to protect themselves from government snooping by setting strong passcodes on their phones — passcodes the FBI would not be able to unlock even if it gets its iPhone backdoor.
The technical details of how the iPhone encrypts data, and how the FBI might circumvent this protection, are complex and convoluted, and are being thoroughly explored elsewhere on the internet. What I’m going to focus on here is how ordinary iPhone users can protect themselves.
The short version: If you’re worried about governments trying to access your phone, set your iPhone up with a random, 11-digit numeric passcode. What follows is an explanation of why that will protect you and how to actually do it.
If it sounds outlandish to worry about government agents trying to crack into your phone, consider that when you travel internationally, agents at the airport or other border crossings can seize, search, and temporarily retain your digital devices — even without any grounds for suspicion. And while a local police officer can’t search your iPhone without a warrant, cops have used their own digital devices to get search warrants within 15 minutes, as a Supreme Court opinion recently noted.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As reported previously, Judge Sheri Pym of U.S. District Court in Los Angeles said on Tuesday that Apple must provide “reasonable technical assistance” to investigators seeking to unlock data on – in other words hack – an iPhone 5C that had been owned by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters.
So far Tim Cook has refused to comply, saying said his company opposed the demand from the judge to help the FBI break into the iPhone. Cook said that the demand threatened the security of Apple’s customers and had “implications far beyond the legal case at hand.”
He added that “the government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals,” he said. “We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack.”
Cook’s summary:
“The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Iphone maker Apple, Inc. claimed last month that their latest iteration of the wildly popular handheld device was unhackable. According to HackRead, the company is so convinced of its security successes that they issued a statement saying that data stored on a phone secured with a front screen passcode was impossible to access – even by highly talented intelligence agencies:
The CIA and the FBI are always looking for backdoors in Apple devices, in fact, the agency spent years trying to hack iPhone and iPads according to documents released by NSA’s Edward Snowden.
Now, with the new upgraded operating systems, Apple has termed it “impossible” to access any data from Apple devices. Though, the company can still access data from older phones.
…
According to the Apple’s response to the court, 90 percent of the devices has ios 8 installed and with the type of encryption already there in the phone, it’s nearly impossible to access the data without the passcode, which is only known to the original owner. Even Apple itself cannot find the code.
But as we already know from recent hacks of Department of Defense computers, essential domestic grid infrastructure computers, and even NASA’s in-orbit spacecraft, in the digital age nothing is ever really secure.
Within hours of Apple releasing their latest iOS 9 update a cyber security firm known as Zerodium issued a challenge to the hacker community and offered up a $1 million bounty for any team that could bypass Apple’s latest security features. For weeks it appeared that Apple was right. Scores of hackers around the world burned the midnight oil trying to hack the iphone before Zerodium’s bounty expired.
But just few hours before the challenge came to end, one team submitted their exploits and vulnerabilities and Zerodium has confirmed that the Apple’s iOS 9 has been compromised.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
