data

After being burned to a crisp having been found to be manhandling Facebook users’ data, Cambridge Analytica’s ashes blew away on 2 May. Before it did, former employees had told Gizmodo that they knew the writing was on the wall for the data analytics company, but they didn’t realize how fast...

Google’s effort to rein in the so-called right to be forgotten has taken a hit after U.K. and French judges said the reputation of businessmen tarnished by old news stories about improper conduct trumped the public’s need to know. Google was told by a London judge on Friday for the first time...

We’re sure you’ve heard of Cambridge Analytica (CA), the controversial company that harvested data from Facebook and then used it in ways that you almost certainly wouldn’t have wanted. About a month ago, we reported how a CA whistleblower named Christopher Wylie claimed that the company had...

Revelations that data belonging to as many 87 million Facebook Inc. users and their friends may have been misused became a game changer in the world of data protection as regulators are looking to raise awareness about how to protect information. Revelations that data belonging to as many 87...

The malware attack on Windows utility CCleaner may have been more targeted and sophisticated than it seemed. In the days since the attack was announced, researchers have been poring through data from a seized command and control center, finding evidence that the attackers were using the...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has demanded Ashley Madison pay US $1.6 million for its failure to protect millions of users' data. As we all recall, hackers stole a database containing the usernames, passwords, and other personal information for all 37 million users of the pro-affair adult...

Yahoo has really been in the firing line in the past few weeks. First came the news that the company had confirmed a data breach of half a billion (5 × 108) records. The age of the breach was as worrying as its size: the data was stolen back in 2014, but Yahoo only reported it recently. The...

Do you use the same password for multiple sites? Do your eyes glaze over after sites like LinkedIn or Yahoo get massively hacked and, like clockwork, the security wonks come wagging their fingers at you for reusing your passwords? Do you shrug and say “Hey, it’s not my job to keep those sites...

A Florida woman who says she barely ever uses her monthly allotment of data recently received a bill from Verizon Wireless for $9,153, claiming she had used 569 GB of data in the span of about 10 days. Every month since February, when she started using Verizon Wireless, the Tampa-area woman...

We’re used to there being two kinds of cell phone plans. There’s the post-paid, where you get a bill every month that may go up or down depending on your usage. And there’s the pre-paid, where you pay your $40 and get your flat amount of data and airtime, and use it until it’s used up. But...

LinkedIn is obviously a very handy tool when it comes to the world of work, but far too many users of the social network are happy to connect with strangers, who could be malicious parties looking to cherry-pick precious data. That's the headline from a new survey of 2,000 people in the UK...

If you think you’re evading the constantly tracking eye of the Internet by using throw-away email addresses and obscure screen names to register your social media accounts and other apps, you’re probably wrong. A new study demonstrates how simple it can be to correctly identify someone using...

Using Reset This PC with the Keep My Files option will essentially perform a fresh install of Windows 10 while keeping all your data intact. When you choose this option from the Recovery Drive, it will find and back up all your data, settings, and apps. It will then install a fresh copy of...

Did you feel like paying more to Comcast next month to keep using the amount of data you’ve been using for years already? No? Well, if you’re in one of several markets in the southeast, tough cookies: Comcast’s data caps, and their fees, are coming to a cable modem near you this December. DSL...

It has been nearly two months since the launch of Windows 10, and Microsoft is finally responding to the growing privacy concerns around the new operating system. In a detailed blog post from Windows chief Terry Myerson, Microsoft details all of the ways Windows 10 collects and uses data...

Perhaps we’re getting too used to big tech companies collecting, using, and often distributing information about us without our permission. Invasions of our privacy have become commonplace, and, for the most part, we tolerate them. We do so, solely, it would seem, because we value the...

This post was originally published on Oct. 31, 2009, and updated on Aug. 7, 2014, by Brandon Widder. The following instructions now pertain to BitLocker as our previous software choice, TrueCrypt, is no longer available. Michael Brown and Emily Schiola contributed to this post. In this day and...

Even though Facebook is very useful when it comes to staying connected with friends, spying on your ex, and pretending you’re awfully happy with your life, the social network isn’t letting you do this for charity — rather, it’s vacuuming up as much information about you as it can to sell better...

As we learned from a recent study, Verizon has been remarkably efficient at convincing unlimited wireless data plan holders to switch to newer, more profitable data plans. According to market research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, just 22% of Verizon’s mobile subscribers were...

Internet users who are actively trying to make sure their online activity isn’t tracked by websites or government agencies should know there’s an even creepier tracking tool out there used by a variety of websites, “from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn,” as ProPublica puts it, that’s almost impossible...