Photos of Bolivian ex-president in prison keep making the media, daughter charges ‘psychological and physical torture’

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Jeanine Añez is held by Bolivian courts as a “flight risk” and because of fear she might “interfere with investigations,” but her daughter Carolina Ribera says that by allowing pictures of the jailed former leader prison authorities are interfering with her mother’s privacy in actions that amount to psychological and emotional torture, and “physical harassment.”

Ribera says the ruling MAS party is using her mother as a political trophy and “so they believe they have the right to violate her in all those ways.”

“It is a type of harassment to take her pictures clandestinely, without her authorization, to Photoshop it, edit, and to publish it in all the networks and to tell lies about her. It is because of this that my mother is suffering physical and emotional torture,” said her daughter in a television interview decrying a widely published picture of her mother on her prison bed, eating. The picture was later shown to be Photoshopped with the addition of fries and a Burger King bag. This was relevant because Añez has claimed health issues with high blood pressure and, according to a Bolivian verification site, she was eating an avocado and not fried fast foods.

“She is feeling harassed in this form because this generates certain rejection, certain discomfort in the condition in which she is because she feels invaded,” charged her daughter.

Añez is being held in La Paz’s Miraflores Women’s prison among high-security inmates who are serving sentences of more than 8 years.

By Milan Sime Martinic

Hackers hack into 150,000 security cameras worldwide

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An international hacker collective wanting to show how monitored we are and how easy surveillance systems are to hack, breached camera-maker Verkada, gaining access to the video systems of all its customers which included hospitals, prisons, schools and police stations, and companies such as Tesla, Cloudflare and others, according to Swiss hacker Tillie Kottmann, who claimed credit on behalf of the collective.

By Milan Sime Martinic

WhatsApp is changing today – Users must give the app permission to send their private data to Facebook or lose account

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WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014, but has thrived while promoting itself as a privacy-respecting messaging app that now has 1.5b monthly active users. This week, though, WhatApp sent out an update to users’ phones that they must ‘consent’ to a new policy or lose access.

Whatsapp will now share more of your data, including your IP address (your location) and phone number, your account registration information, your transaction data, and service-related data, interactions on WhatsApp, and other data collected based on your consent, with Facebook’s other companies. Facebook has been working towards more closely integrating Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.

Users who do not agree to ‘consent’ to the new policy will see their WhatsApp account become inaccessible until they do ‘consent.’ These accounts will remain dormant for 120 days after which they will be ‘deleted.’

The biggest change to the user policy, which many people ignored and clicked ‘agree’ to, thinking it was just another unimportant app update message, now reads,

‘We collect information about your activity on our Services, like service-related, diagnostic, and performance information. This includes information about your activity (including how you use our Services, your Services settings, how you interact with others using our Services (including when you interact with a business), and the time, frequency, and duration of your activities and interactions), log files, and diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports. This also includes information about when you registered to use our Services; the features you use like our messaging, calling, Status, groups (including group name, group picture, group description), payments or business features; profile photo, “about” information; whether you are online, when you last used our Services (your “last seen”); and when you last updated your “about” information.’

Notably, Elon Musk tweeted on the news, saying that WhatsApp users should switch to Signal, one of several popular privacy-focused messaging apps similar to WhatsApp.

The data sharing policy change doesn’t affect people in Europe due to GDPR data protection regulations.

Police Need Warrant to Track Your Cellphone, Supreme Court Rules

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“[A]n individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements” – Chief Justice John Roberts

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for a change in the law regulating the ability of police to search citizens’ phone records.

Since a 1979 ruling, which decided that citizens had no expectation of privacy for their phone records kept by a phone company, police have been able to search people’s phones without probable cause (strong evidence the person has committed a crime). However, police can still obtain records without a warrant in the case of an emergency, and they can search other items people carry without probable cause.

The court found that “an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements” as these movements are captured and recorded by phone companies.

The majority of the Supreme court framed the question in terms of a shift in the role and capabilities of technology, specifically cell phones and data collection and records, with one writing that a mobile phone was now “a feature of human anatomy” that “faithfully follows its owner beyond public thoroughfares and into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales” and “when the government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.”

The decision was 5-4.

Ricochet, A New Chat App, Aims to Be Even More Secure than Encryption

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The chat app aims to hide even metadata, the graph of its users’ connections and activity (as opposed to just hiding the content of messages).

Ricochet applies Tor-like tech to cloak the user’s device, not just web destinations. Messages also do not use a central server to send messages, so the data does not exist there.

“There’s no record in the cloud somewhere that you ever used it,” John Brooks, the 25-year-old developer said of his app. “It’s all mixed in with everything else happening in Tor. You’re invisible among the crowd.”