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Facebook can track every image uploaded to it even outside of Facebook with a “hidden” digital tag

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Facebook’s always at the centre of some privacy controversy or other these days. Programmer Edin Jusupovic, spotted something rather odd recently when looking at a hex dump of an image file of unknown origin. After doing a little investigation, it appears to be IPTC “Special Instructions” injected into the image by Facebook.

This header is then kept with the file, as it gets downloaded and reposted around the web. This data seems to have been around since at least 2015, but it seems to have largely gone unnoticed. Now, though, it’s seeing renewed interest in light of recent events and it presents, in Jusupovic’s words, a “shocking level of tracking”.

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Intrusive helicopter photos force Prince Harry and Meghan to move home

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Back in January current year, a picture agency used a helicopter to fly over Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s home and take photos. This invaded the couple’s privacy and safety so much, that they reportedly had to move out after the images were published in multiple outlets.

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Google disables “Photos” on Android TV after privacy bug exposes users

Google has disabled Photos on Android TV temporarily due to a privacy bug. The bug allowed some Android TV users to view the profile photos and account names of “hundreds” of users. It was first spotted by Twitter user prashanth after trying to set up his new Android-based Vu TV.

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Major Photos API bug on Facebook exposed 6.8 million users private photos

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Facebook has today disclosed a major bug that existed on the platform for 12 days between September 13th and September 25th, 2018. The bug has now been fixed, but it opened up access to the private photos of over 6.8 million users to apps through the photo API.

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Don’t want to be in this festival’s photographs? Then put a red dot on your head

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The whole issue of privacy in a public place seems to keep coming up. People want their privacy, I get that. But they want it in public places, where everybody else can see. While privacy advocates might object to cameras being pointed anywhere near their general direction, they seem to forget they are seen by potentially hundreds of CCTV cameras a day.

One festival company, Haarlem Culinair, thinks they’ve found a solution, though. They’ve come up with a pretty ingenious opt-out scheme for festival-goers. Stick a great big red dot on your forehead.

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The GDPR – how bad is it for photographers?

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The EU has a new data protection law, the so-called GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we Germans like to call it: “Datenschutzgrundverordnung” (Gesundheit!). The rules took effect on May 25th and so far it’s pretty chaotic: in the EU we cannot reach some newspapers in the outside world because they cannot comply with the new rules.

A guy in Austria is using the law to file $8.8 billion dollar lawsuits against Facebook and Google. Hundreds of bloggers have taken down their sites, fearful of the possibility of serious fines. Internet light bulbs have stopped working properly. And photographers are being targeted, too.

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This TV news segment renews privacy concerns regarding “peeping drones”

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We’ve all experienced how sensationalism can sometimes mire legitimate news stories, and we have plenty of examples out there. Just yesterday, there was a news segment on Today that showed just how easy it is for people to spy on you in your own house using “peeping drones.” Although the reporter offers some legitimate points, should we really be that worried about our privacy when it comes to drones?

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Instagram to let you download your content after portability concerns

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Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s privacy & portability issues have been all over the news lately. Naturally, some attention has turned toward Instagram, too. After all, he owns them both, so why not look at both platforms? TechCrunch posted an article a few days ago about Instagram’s portability problem. That problem being that you’re unable to download your data.

While Facebook (sort of) allows you to do this (it’s never worked for me), Instagram doesn’t. In response, TechCrunch report that Instagram has announced that this feature is on the way.

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DJI accused of spying on the US for China according to leaked government memo

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It seems that crowdsourcing is not beyond intelligence agencies. At least, according to a leaked memo from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In it, they say that the Special Agent in Charge Intelligence Program (SIP) Los Angeles have “moderate confidence” that DJI is providing critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to China.

They also say that they have “high confidence” that they are “selectively targeting government and privately owned entities within these sectors to expand its ability to collect and exploit sensitive U.S. data”. It all sounds a bit James Bond to me, but this isn’t the first time DJI’s been in the middle of security controversy. Nor even the first time this year.

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