(Reuters) - Blackstone Group Inc (BX.N) said on Wednesday it agreed to acquire genealogy provider Inc from private equity rivals for $4.7 billion, including debt, placing a big bet on family-tree chasing as well as personalized medicine.

Chicago is doubling down on efforts to enforce its emergency coronavirus travel order, as officials will now be reviewing the social media posts of possible violators as the pandemic continues.

“While DSP chips provide a relatively economical solution that allows mobile phones to provide end users with more functionality and enable innovative features—they do come with a cost,” researchers from security firm Check Point wrote in a brief report of the vulnerabilities they discovered.

"Your Nest speakers and displays will notify you if a critical sound is detected, like a smoke alarm or glass breaking, by sending an alert to the Home app," the company wrote in a blog post.

COVID contact tracing apps boast the power of gathering personal data that exposes your activities, movements, and relationships.Experts believe governments must avoid this data-hungry mindset in contact tracing apps.

“Your Nest speakers and displays will notify you if a critical sound is detected, like a smoke alarm or glass breaking, by sending an alert to the Home app.”.

A new report exposes how a federal contractor secretly puts government tracking software into hundreds of mobile apps.Since the data Anomaly Six collects is technically anonymous and since it isn’t selling the data for commercial purposes — i.e. advertising or marketing — it’s fine to do this within the eyes of the law.

Literally anyone anywhere with no record or oversight can go to your state or county election website, type in a few details about you (usually last name and date of birth are sufficient) and pull up your full name, date of birth, home address, phone number, email, sex, and more.

by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, Yesterday Google employees “spy” on smartphone users, collecting their sensitive data and information about their use of other companies' apps, New York resident Robert McCoy alleges in a new class-action complaint.

China’s cavalier approach to privacy has seen the country deploy drones, artificial intelligence, and security cameras to enforce quarantines and monitor public spaces.There are two main approaches to contact tracing apps, and both versions rely on anonymized IDs to record interactions with nearby devices, which allows for complete privacy.

According to the report: A small U.S. company with ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities has embedded its software in numerous mobile apps, allowing it to track the movements of hundreds of millions of mobile phones world-wide, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

A pair of hacks at genealogy site GEDMatch has laid bare serious privacy issues with online databases of DNA information.Privacy News Online is brought to you by Private Internet Access, the world’s most trusted VPN service.

In the case of broadband privacy which was passed at the state level in Maine , the internet service providers (ISPs) actually tried to stop the law from being enacted by claiming that their right to selling profiles of user internet activity and history is part of their constitutional right to free speech .

In an earlier email to Motherboard, the California DMV said data requesters may include insurance companies, vehicle manufacturers, and prospective employers.

“Our entire leadership team is thrilled to have the opportunity to partner with Blackstone to further accelerate Ancestry’s global leadership in family history and consumer genomics, and to help us achieve our mission to empower journeys of personal discovery to enrich lives,” Margo Georgiadis, Ancestry president and CEO, said in a statement.

A data security breach involving an online examination tool used by Australian universities is under investigation."Any breach of security and privacy of this type is of course deeply concerning and we will continue to work with ProctorU to understand the circumstances of the breach and determine whether any follow-up actions are required on our part," the spokeswoman said.

In this research dubbed “ Achilles ” we performed an extensive security review of a DSP chip from one of the leading manufacturers: Qualcomm Technologies.Check Point Research decided not to publish the full technical details of these vulnerabilities until mobile vendors have a comprehensive solution to mitigate the possible risks described.

Despite the FCC's preemption order being overturned in court, the DOJ's amended complaint yesterday argued that California's net neutrality law "is preempted by federal law and therefore violates the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution.".

Whilst the council had industry standard tools deployed to secure its computer network at the time of the attack, which it said had been configured to provide optimum protection, it has since made additional improvements to its cyber-defenses, with further upgrades planned.

“With parent companies based in China, apps like TikTok, WeChat, and others are significant threats to the personal data of American citizens, not to mention tools for Chinese Communist Party content censorship,” said Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state.

Dutton said law enforcement agencies would target terrorists, paedophiles and drug traffickers operating in the dark web – promising proposed new powers will apply “to those people and those people only”.

Speaking to Android Police, OnePlus has since confirmed that it has struck a deal to include Facebook App Installer, Facebook Services, and Facebook App Manager as system apps on its latest smartphones — namely OnePlus 8, 8 Pro, and Nord.

A now-fixed exploit in the macOS version of Microsoft Office may have allowed attackers to hack a Mac user just by getting them to open a document.

Once this integer is found, our second message which we know is also properly will be denoted as M₁.As we know that M₁ is also properly padded, we know the interval in which it resides, and can use this to narrow the possible intervals for M₀.

The new censorship law also seems to have been brought in partly for personal reasons, as Al Jazeera reports: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has greatly concentrated powers into his own hands during 17 years in office, pledged this month to bring social media platforms under control following a series of tweets that allegedly insulted his daughter and son-in-law after they announced the birth of their fourth child on Twitter.

Usually, Google Home devices only respond to its active ‘wake words’ – such as “Ok, Google” or “Hey, Google” – but in this instance the speaker was listening out to a passive sound and make “my dumb smoke detectors smart,” the Reddit user wrote.

A study performed by Google last year, for example, concluded that disabling cookies reduced publisher revenue by more than 50 percent.

The long awaited end of anonymity while gaming in China was announced at the country’s biggest gaming expo, ChinaJoy, by an official from the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Publicity Department.

As global geopolitical tensions continue to rise, there is increasing concern that the data TikTok collects from its users could end up in the hands of the Chinese government.

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