In the case of CVS and Drug Mart, among other data, the product categories used to filter search results are stored.” So for instance, it records the type of pharmaceutical product that someone is looking for, from contraceptives to cholesterol pills. In the case of Teams, it is possible to know, for example, the exact moment the user made a call. “An example is the case of Microsoft Teams or Discord, or the pharmaceutical apps CVS and Drug Mart, which have activities that provide a lot of information. “We found that logs do not contain purely technical information, but also, either through carelessness or intentionally, they can contain personal data or information that reveals the user’s activity,” says Juan Tapiador, a professor at Carlos III University in Madrid and a co-author of the study. But recent research shows that they are still there, and records of everything can be found in them. Google asks app developers to remove logs after apps are published, because they may contain sensitive information. But in reality, that is not the only thing that happens. Its original and accepted use is to detect bugs (errors in the code) before releasing apps to the public. Logs are like a long and exhaustive diary that collects everything that happens in an app. The bottom line is that you can’t do something private by design on a platform like Android, which is flawed by definition.” “It’s a general problem, in tracking apps and everything. Troncoso, who led a European group in charge of creating Covid tracking apps in 2020, warns about the shortcomings of the technology. “This research uncovers a very important hole, which is not well regulated or studied,” says Carmela Troncoso, a researcher at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) a public research university in Switzerland, where she heads the SPRING Lab, a department that works to understand and mitigate the impact of technology on society. Now, new research has discovered that the private information of Android users continues to escape through this loophole, giving companies more access to it than they should have. The idea never quite worked, but what really killed it was the fact that, despite all the early promises of preserving users’ security and privacy, a Google error allowed data to escape from Android mobile devices through an unsuspected place: the app’s logs. In Spain, an app called Radar Covid meant to help users know if they’d been near an infected person crashed and burned quickly. Digital tracking was one of the short-lived successes of the Covid pandemic. In a normal country, like France, if they don't want you to see Reims Air Base, they just plop big pixels on it, like this. But the Dutch are, in their way, almost as peculiar. North Korea has chosen to block its entire self. Google allows countries to block out neighborhoods or buildings for security purposes. This is how, Mishka says, The Netherlands like to keep secrets. They've changed it since, but what's underneath is a storage facility that serves NATO. The Dutch government superimposed them on Google Maps to disguise what's underneath. There's a road on one side, plowed farmland all about, some trees on the lower left and then, weirdly, grey, black, white, golden, green and brown patches crunched together in an almost-rectangle. It's a patch of land near a town called Coevorden, in The Netherlands. When I saw it for the first time, here's what I knew: It's a Google image found on Google Maps, taken by a satellite, plucked and blogged by photographer/sleuth, Mishka Henner.
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