Google has recently announced that they’ll be running a pilot program in which it will utilize voice recognition technology to help transcribe doctor and patient visits. They have built automatic speech recognition models that are capable of handling multiple speaker conversations, meaning that it can separate the voices of the doctor and the patient.

The Department of Social Services has written to 8,500 current and former employees warning them their personal data held by a contractor has been breached.

In letters sent in early November the department alerted the employees to “a data compromise relating to staff profiles within the department’s credit card management system prior to 2016”.

The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation is described (PDF) as "a world-first advisory body to enable and ensure safe, ethical innovation in artificial intelligence and data-driven technologies".

Its budget is to come from the £75m earmarked for artificial intelligence, but the Ministry of Fun* has offered precious little else about where the body will sit in the landscape, who will run it and whether it will have any real powers.

The world has never been so dependent on computers, networks and software so ensuring the security and availability of those systems is critical.

Despite this, major security events resulting in loss of data, services, or financial loss are becoming increasingly commonplace.

Brian Honan, founder and head of Ireland's first CSIRT and special adviser on internet security to Europol, argued that failures in cybersecurity should be viewed as an opportunity to learn lessons and prevent them happening again.

Here’s the good news. While their microphones are always on, Google Home and Alexa don’t actually do anything with your voice until you say their “wake word,” which is usually just ‘OK Google’ or ‘Alexa’. Despite the occasional viral story that suggests otherwise, Amazon and Google truly aren't keeping track of every single thing you say.

The massive Uber data breach will be discussed by the European Union's data protection authorities next week.

The group, known as the Article 29 Working Party, is meeting on November 28-29 and has put the hack, which affected 57 million users, high on its agenda.

Trevor Paglen describes himself as a landscape artist, but he is no John Constable. The landscapes Paglen frames extend to the bottom of the ocean and beyond the blurred edges of the Earth’s atmosphere. For the last two decades, the artist, a cheerful and fervent man of 43, has been on a mission to photograph the unseen political geography of our times. His art tries to capture places that are not on any map – the secret air bases and offshore prisons from which the war on terror has been fought – as well as the networks of data collection and surveillance that now shape our democracies, the cables, spy satellites and artificial intelligences of the digital world.

The federal government is considering allowing private companies to use its national facial recognition database for a fee, documents released under Freedom of Information laws reveal.

The partially redacted documents show that the Attorney General’s Department is in discussions with major telecommunications companies about pilot programs for private sector use of the Facial Verification Service in 2018. The documents also indicate strong interest from financial institutions in using the database.

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chariman of Alphabet, says the company is working to ferret out Russian propaganda from Google News after facing criticism that Kremlin-owned media sites had been given plum placement on the search giant’s news and advertising platforms.

A Nov. 19 report by advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW), which refers to the presentation, looks at one of the most ambitious systems being set up thanks to personal information linked to government-issued IDs. Called “Police Cloud,” it appears to be a project of the Ministry of Public Security, which issued a regulation in 2015 aimed at enhancing nation-wide information sharing through provincial-level police cloud-computing centers (link in Chinese).

These databases can scoop up everything from addresses, to medical history, supermarket membership, and delivery records. Data analytics and cloud computing allow security bureau authorities to then look for patterns in personal data far more efficiently than was possible even a few years ago, and make predictions. The ministry couldn’t be reached out for comment.

Amazon Web Services on Monday introduced cloud service for the CIA and other members of the U.S. intelligence community.

The launch of the so-called AWS Secret Region comes six years after AWS introduced GovCloud, its first data-center region for public-sector customers. AWS has since announced plans to expand GovCloud. The new Secret Region signals interest in using AWS from specific parts of the U.S. government.

If you have the uncomfortable sense someone is looking over your shoulder as you surf the Web, you're not being paranoid. A new study finds hundreds of sites—including microsoft.com, adobe.com, and godaddy.com—employ scripts that record visitors' keystrokes, mouse movements, and scrolling behavior in real time, even before the input is submitted or is later deleted.

Session replay scripts are provided by third-party analytics services that are designed to help site operators better understand how visitors interact with their Web properties and identify specific pages that are confusing or broken. As their name implies, the scripts allow the operators to re-enact individual browsing sessions. Each click, input, and scroll can be recorded and later played back.

A study published last week reported that 482 of the 50,000 most trafficked websites employ such scripts, usually with no clear disclosure. It's not always easy to detect sites that employ such scripts. The actual number is almost certainly much higher, particularly among sites outside the top 50,000 that were studied.

Facebook Inc. will show people which Russian propaganda pages or accounts they’ve followed and liked on the social network, responding to a request from Congress to address manipulation and meddling during the 2016 presidential election.

The tool will appear by the end of the year in Facebook’s online support center, the company said in a blog post Wednesday. It will answer the user question, “How can I see if I’ve liked or followed a Facebook page or Instagram account created by the Internet Research Agency?” That’s the Russian firm that created thousands of incendiary posts from fake accounts posing as U.S. citizens. People will see a list of the accounts they followed, if any, from January 2015 through August 2017.

New revelations that Uber suffered a major security breach in 2016 — and initially withheld details from drivers, riders and regulators alike — is touching off another round of government probes and customer lawsuits targeting the ride-hailing giant.

At least five states — Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York and Connecticut — told Recode this week that they would investigate the matter, after Uber revealed on Wednesday that the intrusion affected 57 million customers, compromising names, addresses and driver’s license numbers in some cases.

Hackers stole the personal data of 57 million customers and drivers from Uber Technologies Inc., a massive breach that the company concealed for more than a year. This week, the ride-hailing firm ousted its chief security officer and one of his deputies for their roles in keeping the hack under wraps, which included a $100,000 payment to the attackers.

Compromised data from the October 2016 attack included names, email addresses and phone numbers of 50 million Uber riders around the world, the company told Bloomberg on Tuesday. The personal information of about 7 million drivers was accessed as well, including some 600,000 U.S. driver’s license numbers. No Social Security numbers, credit card information, trip location details or other data were taken, Uber said.

Russia’s Telegram messenger has blocked for the first time a channel for broadcasting audio content in violation of author’s rights, Russia’s telecom and IT watchdog Roskomnadzor said on Wednesday.

"The Telegram messenger has for the first time blocked a channel that broadcast an audio content in violation of author’s rights. We will unite efforts in the fight for a legal content," the watchdog wrote on Facebook.

Mozilla engineers are working on a notifications system for Firefox that shows a security warning to users visiting sites that have suffered data breaches.

The notifications system will use data provided by Have I Been Pwned?, a website that indexes public data breaches and allows users to search and see if their details have been compromised in any of these incidents.

Thousands of Uber customers are believed to have had their accounts hacked by Russians after users of the app reported being billed in roubles for taxi journeys they had not taken in Moscow and St Petersburg.

The failure of Emberlight reminds us that Internet of Things devices may not work when the vendor stops supporting them.