Voice recognition—and data collection—have boomed in recent years. Researchers are figuring out how to protect your privacy.

Your voice reveals more about you than you realize. To the human ear, your voice can instantly give away your mood, for example—it’s easy to tell if you’re excited or upset. But machines can learn a lot more: inferring your age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, health conditions, and beyond. Researchers have even been able to generate images of faces based on the information contained in individuals’ voice data.

As machines become better at understanding you through your voice, companies are cashing in. Voice recognition systems—from Siri and Alexa to those using your voice as your password—have proliferated in recent years as artificial intelligence and machine learning have unlocked the ability to understand not just what you are saying but who you are. Big Voice may be a $20 billion industry within a few years. And as the market grows, privacy-focused researchers are increasingly searching for ways to protect people from having their voice data used against them.

Vocal Threats

Both the words you say and how you say them can be used to identify you, says Emmanuel Vincent, a senior research scientist specializing in voice technologies at France’s National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria), but this is only the beginning. “You will also find other pieces of information about your emotions or your medical condition,” Vincent says.

“These additional pieces of information help build a more complete profile—then this would be used for all sorts of targeted advertisements,” Vincent says. As well as your voice data potentially feeding into the vast realm of data used to show you online ads, there’s also the risk that hackers could access the location where your voice data is stored and use it to impersonate you. A small number of these cloning incidents have already happened, proving the value your voice holds. Simple robocall scams have also recorded people saying “yes” to use the confirmation in payment scams.

Last year, TikTok changed its privacy policies and started collecting the voiceprints—a loose term for the data your voice contains—of people in the US alongside other biometric data, such as your faceprint. More broadly, call centers are using AI to analyze people’s “behavior and emotion” during phone calls and evaluate the “tone, pace, and pitch of every single word” to develop profiles of people and increase sales. “We’re almost in a situation where the systems to recognize who you are and link everything together exist, but the protection is not there—and it’s still quite far away from being readily usable,” says Henry Turner, who researched the security of voice systems at the University of Oxford.

Hidden Meaning

Your voice is produced through a complex process involving the lungs and your voice box, throat, nose, mouth, and sinuses. More than a hundred muscles are activated when you speak, says Rébecca Kleinberger, a voice researcher at the MIT Media Lab. “It's also very much the brain,” Kleinberger says. 

Researchers are experimenting with four ways to enhance privacy for your voice, says Natalia Tomashenko, a researcher at Avignon University, France, who has been studying voice and is the first author of a research paper on the results of a voice privacy engineering challenge. None of the methods are perfect, but they are being explored as possible ways to boost privacy in the infrastructure processing your voice data.

First is obfuscation, which tries to completely hide who the speaker is. Think of a Hollywood depiction of a hacker totally distorting their voice over a phone call as they explain a devilish plot or ransom (or hacktivist collective Anonymous’s promotional videos). Simple voice-changing hardware allows anyone to quickly change the sound of their voice. More advanced speech-to-text-to-speech systems can transcribe what you’re saying and then reverse the process and say it in a new voice.

Second, Tomashenko says, researchers are looking at distributed and federated learning—where your data doesn’t leave your device but machine learning models still learn to recognize speech by sharing their training with a bigger system. Another approach involves building encrypted infrastructure to protect people’s voices from snooping. However, most efforts are focused on voice anonymization.

Anonymization attempts to keep your voice sounding human while stripping out as much of the information that could be used to identify you as possible. Speech anonymization efforts currently involve two separate strands: anonymizing the content of what someone is saying by deleting or replacing any sensitive words in files before they are saved and anonymizing the voice itself. Most voice anonymization efforts at the moment involve passing someone’s voice through experimental software that will change some of the parameters in the voice signal to make it sound different. This can involve altering the pitch, replacing segments of speech with information from other voices, and synthesizing the final output.

Does anonymization technology work? Male and female voice clips that were anonymized as part of the Voice Privacy Challenge in 2020 definitely do sound different. They’re more robotic, sound slightly pained and could—to some listeners at least—be from a different person than the original voice clips. “I think it can already guarantee a much higher level of protection than doing nothing, which is the current status,” says Vincent, who has been able to reduce how easy it is to identify people in anonymization research. However, humans aren’t the only listeners. Rita Singh, an associate professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, says that total de-identification of the voice signal is not possible, as machines will always have the potential to make links between attributes and individuals, even connections that aren’t clear to humans. “Is the anonymization with respect to a human listener or is it with respect to a machine listener?” says Shri Narayanan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Southern California.

“True anonymization is not possible without completely changing the voice,” Singh says. “When you completely change the voice, then it's not the same voice.” Despite this, it is still worth developing voice-privacy technology, Singh adds, as no privacy or security system is totally secure. Fingerprints and face identification systems on iPhones have been spoofed in the past, but overall, they’re still an effective method of protecting people’s privacy.

Bye, Alexa

Your voice is increasingly being used as a way to verify your identity. For example, a growing number of banks and other companies are analyzing your voiceprints, with your permission, to replace your password. There’s also the potential for voice analysis to detect illness before other signs are obvious. But the technology to clone or fake someone’s voice is advancing quickly.

If you have a few minutes of someone’s voice recorded, or in some instances a few seconds, it’s possible to recreate that voice using machine learning—_The Simpsons’_ voice actors could be replaced by deep fake voice clones, for instance. And commercial tools for recreating voices are readily available online. “There’s definitely more work in speaker identification and producing speech to text and text to speech than there is in protecting people from any of those technologies,” Turner says.

Many of the voice anonymization techniques being developed at the moment are still a long way from being used in the real world. When they are ready to be used it’s likely that companies will have to implement tools themselves, to protect their customers' privacy—there’s currently little individuals can do to protect their own voice. Avoiding calls with call centers or companies that use voice analysis, and not using voice assistants, could limit how much your voice is recorded and reduce possible attack opportunities.

But the biggest protections may come from legal cases and protections. Europe’s GDPR covers biometric data, including people’s voices, in its privacy protections. Guidelines say people should be told how their data is being used and provide consent if they’re being identified, and that some restrictions should be placed on personalization. Meanwhile, in the US, courts in Illinois— home to some of the strongest biometric laws in the country—are increasingly inspecting cases involving people’s voice data. McDonald’s, Amazon, and Google are all facing judicial scrutiny over how they use people’s voice data. The decisions in these cases could lay down new rules for the protection of people’s voices.

The Race to Hide Your Voice

Plus: Google patches 36 Android vulnerabilities, Cisco fixes three high-severity issues, and VMWare closes two “serious” flaws.

May has been another busy month of security updates, with Google’s Chrome browser and Android operating system, Zoom, and Apple’s iOS releasing patches to fix serious vulnerabilities.

Meanwhile, things have not run smoothly for Microsoft, which was forced to issue an out-of-band update after a disastrous Patch Tuesday during the month. And Cisco, Nvidia, Zoom, and VMWare all issued patches for pressing flaws.

Here’s what you need to know.

Apple iOS and iPadOS 15.5, macOS Big Sur 11.6.6, tvOS 15.5, watchOS 8.6

With Apple due to announce iOS 16 at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, the iPhone maker released probably its last major iOS 15-point update in May. It came with new features, but iOS and iPadOS 15.5 also fixed 34 security vulnerabilities, some of which are serious.

Security issues fixed in iOS 15.5 include flaws in the Kernel, as well as in the WebKit browser engine, according to Apple’s support page. Thankfully, none of the issued patches in iOS and iPad 15.5 are being used in attacks, according to the company, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be if you don’t update now.

Meanwhile, users of macOS, tvOS, and the Apple Watch should update their devices ASAP, as Apple also issued an emergency update to patch an issue it believes is already being used in attacks. The flaw in Apple AVD, labeled CVE-2022-22675, could allow an app to execute code with Kernel privileges. Issues in the Kernel are as bad as it gets, so it’s worth checking and updating your devices right away.

Microsoft’s Flubbed May Patch Tuesday

Microsoft’s May Patch Tuesday was something of a disaster for the diligent businesses that installed it straight away.

On May 10, the firm issued security updates to fix 75 vulnerabilities, eight labeled as serious and three that were being exploited by attackers. The issues fixed in May’s Patch Tuesday were important, but there were soon problems for some Microsoft users, who reported authentication failures after installing the latest updates. It impacted people using the client and server Windows platforms and systems running all Windows versions, including Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022.

In a bid to fix the problem, the firm was forced to issue an out-of-band update for Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019, and 2022 on May 20. The update won’t install automatically—you need to download it from Microsoft’s update catalog.

Firefox 100.0.2

In early May, Mozilla released Firefox 100, including nine security fixes for its Firefox browser, of which seven were rated as high severity. But later in May, ethical hackers at the Pwn20wn competition in Vancouver were able to demonstrate how attackers could execute JavaScript code on devices running the latest Mozilla software. Mozilla fixed the issues in another updateFirefox 100.0.2, Firefox ESR 91.9.1, Firefox for Android 100.3, and Thunderbird 91.9.1. Click those update buttons.

Android

May’s Android security update is a big one, patching 36 vulnerabilities, including an issue already being exploited by attackers. This exploited flaw is a privilege escalation bug in the Linux Kernel known as “The Dirty Pipe.”

The flaw, which impacts newer Android devices running Android 12 and later, was disclosed by Google in February, but it has taken a while to reach devices.

You Need to Update iOS, Chrome, Windows, and Zoom ASAP

May has been another busy month of security updates, with Google’s Chrome browser and Android operating system, Zoom, and Apple’s iOS releasing patches to fix serious vulnerabilities.

Meanwhile, things have not run smoothly for Microsoft, which was forced to issue an out-of-band update after a disastrous Patch Tuesday during the month. And Cisco, Nvidia, Zoom, and VMWare all issued patches for pressing flaws.

Here’s what you need to know.

Apple iOS and iPadOS 15.5, macOS Big Sur 11.6.6, tvOS 15.5, watchOS 8.6

With Apple due to announce iOS 16 at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, the iPhone maker released probably its last major iOS 15 point update in May. It came with new features, but iOS and iPadOS 15.5 also fixed 34 security vulnerabilities, some of which are serious.

Security issues fixed in iOS 15.5 include flaws in the Kernel as well as in the WebKit browser engine, according to Apple’s support page. Thankfully, none of the issued patches in iOS and iPad 15.5 are being used in attacks, according to the company, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be if you don’t update now.

Meanwhile, users of macOS, tvOS, and the Apple Watch should update their devices ASAP, as Apple also issued an emergency update to patch an issue it believes is already being used in attacks. The flaw in Apple AVD, labeled CVE-2022-22675, could allow an app to execute code with Kernel privileges. Issues in the Kernel are as bad as it gets, so it’s worth checking and updating your devices right away.

Microsoft’s Flubbed May Patch Tuesday

Microsoft’s May Patch Tuesday was something of a disaster for the diligent businesses that installed it straight away.

On May 10, the firm issued security updates to fix 75 vulnerabilities, eight labeled as serious and three that were being exploited by attackers. The issues fixed in May’s Patch Tuesday were important, but there were soon problems for some Microsoft users, who reported authentication failures after installing the latest updates. It impacted people using the client and server Windows platforms and systems running all Windows versions, including Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022.

In a bid to fix the problem, the firm was forced to issue an out-of-band update for Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019, and 2022 on May 20. The update won’t install automatically—you need to download it from Microsoft's update catalog.

Firefox 100.0.2

In early May, Mozilla released Firefox 100, including nine security fixes for its Firefox browser, of which seven were rated as high severity. But later in May, ethical hackers at the Pwn20wn competition in Vancouver were able to demonstrate how attackers could execute JavaScript code on devices running the latest Mozilla software. Mozilla fixed the issues in another update, Firefox 100.0.2, Firefox ESR 91.9.1, Firefox for Android 100.3, and Thunderbird 91.9.1. Click those update buttons.

Android

May’s Android security update is a big one, patching 36 vulnerabilities including an issue already being exploited by attackers. The already exploited flaw is a privilege escalation bug in the Linux Kernel known as “The Dirty Pipe.”

The flaw, which impacts newer Android devices running Android 12 and later, was disclosed by Google in February, but it’s taken a while to reach devices.

DPRK hackers are tricking their way into jobs with western firms. A US government alert reminds employers they're on the front lines—and potentially on the hook.

For more than a decade, North Korean hackers and digital scammers have run wild, pilfering hundreds of millions of dollars to raise funds for the Hermit Kingdom and often leaving chaos in their wake. But while the United States and other governments regularly call out North Korea’s digital espionage operations and issue indictments against their hackers, it has proved more difficult to bring charges for rogue theft and profiteering. North Korea has been under extensive sanctions by the US and other governments for years, but efforts to address the regime’s financial crimes have met with obstacles. 

Last week, the US Treasury, State Department, and Federal Bureau of Investigation jointly issued a 16-page alert warning businesses to guard against a particular scam in which North Korean IT workers apply for freelance contracts—often with wealthy North American, European, and East Asian firms—to generate revenue for their country. The workers pose as IT workers of other nationalities, pretending to be remote workers from South Korea, China, Japan, Eastern Europe, or the US. The alert notes that there are thousands of North Korean IT workers taking on such contracts. Some conduct their work from North Korea itself and others work overseas, mainly out of China and Russia, with small contingents in Southeast Asia and Africa. In some cases, the North Korean scammers themselves sub-contract with other more legitimate workers to enhance their credibility.

“DPRK IT workers can individually earn more than USD 300,000 a year in some cases, and teams of IT workers can collectively earn more than USD 3 million annually,” the alert warns. “DPRK IT workers provide a critical stream of revenue that helps fund the DPRK regime’s highest economic and security priorities, such as its weapons development program.”

When US businesses unknowingly contract with North Koreans, they are violating government sanctions and face legal risk. But the scams are challenging to deal with, since workers typically complete the assignments to earn their compensation. Without vigilance, businesses could be unaware that anything shady is going on.

The alert emphasizes that while businesses need to be aware of the issue so they can comply with sanctions, North Korean IT contractors also sometimes use their access to plant malware and facilitate espionage and intellectual property theft.

“There have been a lot of cases where we’re seeing North Korean actors interviewing for jobs and using that to try to ultimately deploy malware or get into an environment,” says Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. “The reason this is important is a lot of people don’t consider this threat or write it off as, ‘Oh, North Korea, they’re crazy. They’re not sophisticated.’ And if you’re talking to an actual person, it feels like there’s not going to be a cyber threat in that, but these are human-enabled operations that the North Koreans have gotten really good at, so bringing awareness to this issue is really important.”

North Korean IT workers have thorough training, making detection more difficult, and the alert notes that they have developed software, websites, and other platforms for a variety of sectors, including health and fitness, social networking, sports, entertainment, and lifestyle, along with cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. The workers have the expertise to do IT support and database management, build mobile and web apps, develop cryptocurrency platforms, work in artificial intelligence and virtual reality or augmented reality, and develop facial recognition and biometric authentication tools.

The alert lists a number of “red flag indicators” of a North Korean IT worker scam. Many overlap with general best practices for avoiding online scams, like monitoring for unusual logins or IP addresses and contractors who use suspicious digital accounts to collect payments or require payment in cryptocurrency, submit formulaic job applications and documents rather than personalized ones, and have perfect reviews on hiring websites that were all written within a short time span. 

Incident responders note that while the US government alert offers a helpful level of detail and transparency, it’s still difficult for potential victims to respond meaningfully. 

“The issue is always, whose responsibility is it to protect against these attacks? That’s on individuals and businesses, which often sorely lack the ability to ingest this type of information and make actionable improvements,” says David Kennedy, CEO of the corporate incident response consultancy TrustedSec. “Large companies that have dedicated security teams can use these warnings, but I do really feel that there needs to be a shift toward security for all and helping smaller organizations with defensive positions.”

The alert and other recent government disclosures about North Korean hacking and financial crimes do help raise awareness and likely indicate that the activity is a real and urgent threat. But as Jake Williams, director of cyber threat intelligence at the security firm Scythe puts it, “They have been what I believe to be intentionally vague in recommendations. The more specific they get to businesses, the easier it is for businesses to say that they followed the letter of the instructions and hence have no liability.”

Good Luck Not Accidentally Hiring a North Korean Scammer

DPRK hackers are tricking their way into jobs with Western firms. A US government alert reminds employers they're on the front lines—and potentially on the hook.

For more than a decade, North Korean hackers and digital scammers have run wild, pilfering hundreds of millions of dollars to raise funds for the Hermit Kingdom and often leaving chaos in their wake. But while the United States and other governments regularly call out North Korea’s digital espionage operations and issue indictments against their hackers, it has proved more difficult to bring charges for rogue theft and profiteering. North Korea has been under extensive sanctions by the US and other governments for years, but efforts to address the regime’s financial crimes have met with obstacles.

Last week, the US Treasury, State Department, and Federal Bureau of Investigation jointly issued a 16-page alert warning businesses to guard against a particular scam in which North Korean IT workers apply for freelance contracts—often with wealthy North American, European, and East Asian firms—to generate revenue for their country. The workers pose as IT workers of other nationalities, pretending to be remote workers from South Korea, China, Japan, Eastern Europe, or the US. The alert notes that there are thousands of North Korean IT workers taking on such contracts. Some conduct their work from North Korea itself and others work overseas, mainly out of China and Russia, with small contingents in Southeast Asia and Africa. In some cases, the North Korean scammers themselves sub-contract with other more legitimate workers to enhance their credibility.

“DPRK IT workers can individually earn more than USD 300,000 a year in some cases, and teams of IT workers can collectively earn more than USD 3 million annually,” the alert warns. “DPRK IT workers provide a critical stream of revenue that helps fund the DPRK regime’s highest economic and security priorities, such as its weapons development program.”

When US businesses unknowingly contract with North Koreans, they are violating government sanctions and face legal risk. But the scams are challenging to deal with, since workers typically complete the assignments to earn their compensation. Without vigilance, businesses could be unaware that anything shady is going on.

The alert emphasizes that while businesses need to be aware of the issue so they can comply with sanctions, North Korean IT contractors also sometimes use their access to plant malware and facilitate espionage and intellectual property theft.

“There have been a lot of cases where we’re seeing North Korean actors interviewing for jobs and using that to try to ultimately deploy malware or get into an environment,” says Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. “The reason this is important is a lot of people don’t consider this threat or write it off as, ‘Oh, North Korea, they’re crazy. They’re not sophisticated.’ And if you’re talking to an actual person, it feels like there’s not going to be a cyber threat in that, but these are human-enabled operations that the North Koreans have gotten really good at, so bringing awareness to this issue is really important.”

North Korean IT workers have thorough training, making detection more difficult, and the alert notes that they have developed software, websites, and other platforms for a variety of sectors, including health and fitness, social networking, sports, entertainment, and lifestyle, along with cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. The workers have the expertise to do IT support and database management, build mobile and web apps, develop cryptocurrency platforms, work in artificial intelligence and virtual reality or augmented reality, and develop facial recognition and biometric authentication tools.

The alert lists a number of “red flag indicators” of a North Korean IT worker scam. Many overlap with general best practices for avoiding online scams, like monitoring for unusual logins or IP addresses and contractors who use suspicious digital accounts to collect payments or require payment in cryptocurrency, submit formulaic job applications and documents rather than personalized ones, and have perfect reviews on hiring websites that were all written within a short time span.

Incident responders note that while the US government alert offers a helpful level of detail and transparency, it’s still difficult for potential victims to respond meaningfully.

“The issue is always, whose responsibility is it to protect against these attacks? That’s on individuals and businesses, which often sorely lack the ability to ingest this type of information and make actionable improvements,” says David Kennedy, CEO of the corporate incident response consultancy TrustedSec. “Large companies that have dedicated security teams can use these warnings, but I do really feel that there needs to be a shift toward security for all and helping smaller organizations with defensive positions.”

The alert and other recent government disclosures about North Korean hacking and financial crimes do help raise awareness and likely indicate that the activity is a real and urgent threat. But as Jake Williams, director of cyber threat intelligence at the security firm Scythe puts it, “They have been what I believe to be intentionally vague in recommendations. The more specific they get to businesses, the easier it is for businesses to say that they followed the letter of the instructions and hence have no liability.”

Plus: A $150 million Twitter fine, a massive leak from a Chinese prison in Xinjiang, and an ISIS plot to assassinate George W. Bush.

After another week of dismally tragic news and moral failures by the powerful, it's good to know that you can at least depend on the small things, like "privacy-focused" search engine and browser DuckDuckGo resisting the temptation to sell out and help corporations to surveil its users. Oh, wait.

Yes, a security researcher revealed this week that even DuckDuckGo, which markets itself as "the internet privacy company," made an exception for its business partner Microsoft to its browser's blocking of some advertising trackers on websites, sparking accusations of betraying its purported privacy ethos. The milkshake-ducking of DuckDuckGo comes amid a rising awareness of how the stakes of online surveillance are rising as signs grow that the US Supreme Court will overturn _Roe v. Wade_’s protections on abortion rights: A new report this week from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project laid out all the technological means available to law enforcement and private litigants to surveil those seeking abortions, should _Roe_ be struck down. And more than 40 members of Congress called on Google to stop tracking location data in Android ahead of a potential _Roe_ reversal.

In other privacy news, we looked at how the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation has failed to meaningfully curb Big Tech's privacy abuses four years after its passage. Australia's digital driver’s licenses turn out to be far too easy to forge. China has been saber-rattling with accusations about American cyberespionage. We spoke to the inventor of the browser "cookie" about how to handle cookie settings for privacy—and those ubiquitous cookie-related pop-ups on websites. And we also interviewed the CEO of Protonmail, now rebranded as just Proton, about its ambitions to offer a broader range of privacy-focused services beyond email—hopefully without, ahem, surveillance exceptions for its business partners.

But there's more. As usual, we’ve rounded up all the news that we didn’t break or cover in-depth this week. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Cybersecurity and privacy researcher Zach Edwards discovered a glaring hole in the privacy protections of DuckDuckGo's purportedly privacy-focused browser: By examining the browser's data flows on Facebook-owned website Workplace.com, Edwards found that the site's Microsoft-placed tracking scripts continued to communicate back to Microsoft-owned domains like Bing and LinkedIn. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg responded to Edwards on Twitter, admitting that "our search syndication agreement prevents us from stopping Microsoft-owned scripts from loading"—essentially admitting that a partnership deal DuckDuckGo struck with Microsoft includes creating a carveout that lets Microsoft track users of its browsers. Weinberg added that DuckDuckGo is "working to change that." (A company spokesperson reiterated in an email to WIRED Weinberg's assertion that none of this applies to DuckDuckGo search, adding that both its search and its browser offer more privacy protections than the competition.) In the meantime, the revelation blew a glaring hole of its own in the company's reputation as a rare privacy-preserving tech firm. Turns out this surveillance capitalism thing is pretty hard to escape.

Staying on that surveillance capitalism theme, Twitter agreed this week to pay a $150 million fine after the Federal Trade Commission and the US Department of Justice accused it of selling user data that it had collected under the guise of security. Twitter had asked users to share the emails and phone numbers for security purposes, such as two-factor authentication and account recovery, but had ultimately sold the data to advertisers seeking to target ads to its users. That bait-and-switch violated an agreement Twitter made with the FTC in 2011 after earlier privacy misbehavior.

If the world had any doubts that China's"re-education camps" for Muslim minorities in its Xinjiang region were in fact prisons with euphemistic names, a massive leak known as the Xinjiang Police Files should correct that delusion. The leak, provided by an unknown source to researcher Adrien Zenz, who in turn provided the info to a group of global media outlets, includes a vast collection of tens of thousands of internal files, manuals, and even detailed photos revealing life in one of Xinjiang's prisons. The files reveal, for instance, shoot-to-kill orders for any prisoner attempting to escape the camps, and guidelines for shackling the inmates when they're transferred between different parts of the facility—hardly the practices of a "vocational school," as China describes the camps to the world. It also includes photos of the camp's detainees, who were as young as 15 and as old as 73, often jailed for years without trial for offenses as simple as studying Islamic texts.

In a strange replay of events from 2016, Google researchers and the UK government revealed that a site publishing leaked documents from a group of pro-Brexit UK politicians was, in fact, created by Russia-based hackers. The site, called Very English Coop d'Etat, described its collection of leaked emails as coming from an influential group of hardline right-wing Brexit supporters, including former MI6 head Richard Dearlove. But Google's Threat Analysis Group told Reuters that the site appears to have been created by a Russian hacker group it calls Cold River. Former UK intelligence head Dearlove cautioned that the leak of his emails should be understood to be a Russian influence operation, especially given the West's current icy relations with Russia over its illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

An accidentally unsealed warrant, spotted by Forbes, revealed that an Iraqi man had allegedly sought to assassinate former president George W. Bush in Dallas, going so far as to take video of Bush's home in November. According to the warrant, the FBI says it foiled the plot through the use of a confidential informant and surveillance of the would-be assassin's WhatsApp messages' metadata. The case shows how, despite law enforcement's claims that end-to-end encryption can stymy its investigations, the FBI has managed to monitor encrypted apps like WhatsApp and even penetrate communications on them through the use of undercover informants.

DuckDuckGo Isn’t as Private as You Think

We asked the engineer who invented cookies what they mean and how to handle them.

You are not the only person irritated by those pesky cookie permissions boxes. If you click “Accept” by rote, you have no idea what you’re agreeing to. Or perhaps you don’t care? Many users think they have to accept all cookies to access the website, but that’s not always the case. Another option is to manage your cookies, but what does that even mean?

To find out, we spoke to Lou Montulli, the engineer who invented cookies at age 23.

“I’m just like everybody else,” says Montulli. “I want that pop-up to go away as soon as possible. The idea of asking people about permissions every single time they go to a website is annoying.”

Every website you visit places cookies on your browser. The purpose of the cookie is to allow a website to recognize a browser. That’s why you can return to a site and be recognized, even if you don’t always log in. It’s why the stuff in your shopping cart is still there the next day, or that article remembers where you stopped reading. You don’t have to “introduce” yourself every time you visit a site, but is the convenience worth it?

With Montulli’s help, here are some of the most frequently used terms those annoying permissions boxes are asking you about, and what you might want to choose when you see them.

Common Terms

First, let’s explain what some of the types of cookies you’ll see really do:

*   **Session Cookies** are temporary. These aren’t saved when you quit your browser.
*   **Persistent Cookies** will stay on your hard drive until you delete them, or your browser does. These have an expiration date written into their code. That expiration date varies depending on the site or service that issued them and is chosen by the website that places them on your browser.
*   **First-Party Cookies** are those placed directly onto your device by the website you’re visiting.
*   **Third-Party Cookies** are placed on your device but not by the website you’re on, aka the first party. Instead, they’re put onto your device by advertisers, data partners, or any analytics tools that track visitors (usually at the request of that first party. Think Google Analytics for your favorite tech magazine website, for example.)
*   **Strictly Necessary Cookies** allow you to view a website’s content and use its features.
*   **Preference Cookies, aka Functionality Cookies,** allow a website to remember data you typed: for example, your user ID, password, delivery address, email, phone, and preferred method of payment.
*   **Statistics Cookies, aka Performance Cookies**, record how you used a website. Although these see links clicked and pages visited, your identity is not attached to these stats. These can include cookies from a third party. So if a website uses an analytics system from a third party to track what visitors do on that first-party website, it only divulges that tracking info to the website that hired the third party for analytics.

What Am I Supposed to Choose? Does It Matter?

Montulli refers to the pop-up permissions box as “a really silly idea.” His preference would be a much more efficient and technical solution. For example, a user could choose their cookie preferences once in their browser, and every website they visit would honor that choice, similar to the design of Do Not Track. Montulli explained it like this: “Say I want to accept one type of cookie, but not that other cookie, or those cookies, any website could just ask the browser once what any user’s preferences are.” One and done.

That would be better, but what happens when you click “Accept All”—aside from thoughts like, _Why does every website keep asking me these questions?_

What many people (especially Americans) may not know is that in 2018, the European Union (EU) passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). And even if they have heard of it, they may not know enough to understand that this law is partially why cookie permission boxes are becoming more prevalent.

As part of GDPR, companies based outside Europe can be hit with enormous fines if they track and analyze EU visitors to their website. In other words, say your company resides in New York, but that company has European visitors and customers, or collects their data. If that’s the case, they can be penalized to the tune of tens of millions in fines if they don’t disclose their data collection and obtain the user’s consent.

Understandably, American companies want to avoid huge fines, which is why US users are seeing more and more of these permission boxes.

The boxes are designed to offer users more control over their data, as the EU law was put into place to protect all data belonging to EU citizens and residents. The confusion within the US market exists because the country doesn’t have similar laws to protect the privacy of its citizens.

In February 2022, Saryu Nayyar wrote a piece for _Forbes_ that asks if it’s time for a US version of GDPR. Nayyar wrote that the point of such a law would be “gaining explicit consent for collecting data and deleting data if consent is withdrawn.” That sounds like an awesome idea, but after consulting Montulli, the privacy plot thickens.

Personally, I find it impossible to separate cookies and privacy online. I asked Montulli if it’s true that everything on the internet stays on the internet.

“No,” he says. That’s because information on the internet is detached from your current online presence. The purpose of the cookie is to allow a website to know when the same browser returns. The cookie may contain additional pieces of information. “But the predominant use of it is to pass an ID to your browser as an identifier,” he says.

“Therefore, they can see that this is the same browser that was here a few seconds ago or even a few months ago. But, once the cookie is cleared, there’s no longer any attachment to you.”

The lack of transparency about how cookies work and who manages the data collected from them is a big part of the problem. When you visit a primary website that has hired a third-party ad-tracking network, your browser can get a third-party cookie without your knowledge. “The lack of transparency means that another cookie by another website has added embedded content, without your knowledge.”

Montulli says that if you clear your browser’s cookies frequently there’s no longer any attachment to you and your personal data, at least for that first-party website. “When you return to that website after clearing your cookies, or even if you have a new set of cookies, there’s no association between your browser and the browser that connected to that site several months ago with that old cookie.”

To test the hypothesis, I tried managing and blocking cookies on random sites. I completely ignored the permission box on any that asked me to accept cookies. The majority of those sites allowed me access anyway. Only a few sites blocked me because I ignored the permissions box. In those cases, the only decision I had to make was whether to trust the site. Since I did not actually need to read any content from those sites, I simply moved on. Bottom line, it doesn't hurt to select the cookies you want to accept and those you want to block. Just be prepared to do it every time you visit, or every time you clear your cookies, which you should probably get used to doing regularly.

Source

Wired