As if you didn’t already have enough to worry about, researchers this week showed off how they can eavesdrop on a room that’s hundreds of feet away using only the vibrations of a light bulb. OK, you specifically probably don’t have to worry about it. But it’s a nice reminder of just how sci-fi spying techniques can get in real life.
What should rightly concern you, meanwhile, is the continued lack of security protections for internet of things devices. One potential way to help fix that problem: Give them privacy “nutrition” labels that let customers know exactly how safe a given smart speaker or connected toothbrush is. And Google will include privacy improvements that are not just hypothetical in Android 11, including not letting permissions linger for apps you haven’t used in months.
Hopefully Georgia and other states will make fixes to their voting accommodations by this fall, as this week’s primary meltdown showed how easily poor planning and digital machines can upend an election. We took a look at Intel’s repeated failure to fix a hardware security issue, and Amazon’s promise not to sell facial recognition technology to law enforcement for a year. And coder-turned-kingpin Paul Le Roux was sentenced in New York on Friday after years of misdeeds; you can read more about his unlikely journey in this excerpt from The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal, by Evan Ratliff.
But that’s not all. Every Saturday we round up the security and privacy stories that we didn’t break or rep