data

Researchers say smartwatches could predict people getting Parkinson's disease up to seven years before they developed symptoms. The next steps could be as much an ethical challenge as a technical one. The finding came from researchers who looked at ... data from the UK's Biobank project. That's a database that tracks anonymized health data from half a million volunteers. The idea is that the sheer amount of data makes it easier to spot patterns and connections between different health factors and conditions. As part of the project, just over 100,000 people agreed to wear a smart watch for a seven ... (view more)

An app for spying on a partner or employee has been hacked. It means victims of the spying could face further data security threats. LetMeSpy is what the makers call a "parental control" and "employee control" and what critics call "stalkerware" or ... "spouseware". Once installed on a phone, it lets the person who installed it remotely access text messages, call logs and precise location. (Source: techcrunch.com ) The marketing is somewhat inconsistent with what the company says its intended use is for, suggesting people might put it on their own phone so that they can find the phone when lost, ... (view more)

Researchers say a feature in a jogging and running app called Strava makes it possible to track down a user's home address. However, they make a pretty weak argument about how plausible and successful an attack would be. Strava lets users track ... their fitness activities, including running routes. Since 2018, the app has included a "heatmap" feature that shows areas where a lot of users are active. The idea is to let people spot well-used running routes that may be useful for their needs. The feature has already been criticized after it revealed routes used by US military personnel on foreign ... (view more)

Amazon has reportedly talked with mobile operators about a plan to cut cellphone service costs for Amazon Prime subscribers. The deal could mean customers getting service for $10 a month or even being a "free" part of the Prime subscription. ... Bloomberg broke the story, citing inside sources. Amazon says it doesn't currently have plans to add wireless to Prime but didn't deny having had talks. (Source: bloomberg.com ) According to the report, Amazon is currently speaking to T-Mobile and Verizon, along with Dish Network which is trying to establish itself in the cellphone industry. Amazon is ... (view more)

Amazon has agreed to pay a total of $30 million in penalties for privacy violations related to its Ring and Alexa devices, according to an announcement by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The penalties consist of $25 million for allegedly ... retaining children's data without deletion and $5.8 million for failing to limit employee and contractor access to Ring security videos. (Source: cnet.com ) The settlements do not require Amazon to make any admission of legal wrongdoing. (Source: theguardian.com ) Amazon Accused of Retaining Kid's Data The FTC accused Amazon of preventing parents from ... (view more)

A data recovery firm says it found 3.1 million "deleted" files on a second-hand hard drive. It also found 35 percent of drives had readily-restorable files. The experiment by Secure Data Recovery comes with an obvious warning. It's a company that ... helps people recover deleted or corrupted files from their own drives, so it has an interest in highlighting that such recovery is possible. That said, in this experiment conducted for Tech Radar, the company only tackled those drives where recovering data proved a straightforward task. (Source: techradar.com ) This involved buying 100 hard drives, ... (view more)

The average US broadband subscriber uses almost 600GB a month according to new estimates. The figures also show people on an affordable connection program are making the most of it. The figures come from OpenVault, a company that provides technology ... for "optimizing networks," which naturally means it has an interest in showing broadband networks are under strain. According to the report, the average use was 586.7GB a month, up almost 10 percent last year. That includes both uploads and downloads, which remain in roughly the same proportion as last year. The averages are certainly being driven ... (view more)

Chrome users on Android devices may soon have an "emergency" button to delete the last 15 minutes of browsing history. It's a simplified version of existing settings and follows a similar tool for search history. The search delete tool has been ... available for nearly a year now, but doesn't appear to be widely known about. It's not on the Chrome browser app but rather the dedicated search tool that's accessible on many devices by swiping right from the home screen. Users simply need to click on their profile picture and then select the "Delete last 15 minutes" option. Now it appears a ... (view more)

TikTok has been banned from all US federal government devices over security fears. The ban even extends to phones issued to members of the House of Representatives. The government ban was introduced in the "omnibus" spending bill recently passed by ... Congress. It gives federal employees two months to delete the app, along with any others issued by developers ByteDance, from government-issued handsets. Although the bill did not cover politicians, the House of Representatives chief administrative Catherine Szpindor has written to the house's members and staff to say the rules will now apply to ... (view more)

A computer that uses light - rather than electrons - for processing could be faster, smaller and use less power. Researchers say they've found a way to make an optical computer without the major limitations of previous models. Ultimately, everything ... a computer does is broken down into a series of calculations. In traditional computer processors, these work through a series of physical "logic gates" that either do or don't pass through an electrical signal. This creates a positive or negative electrical charge, which represents either a 0 or 1 in a single bit of data. Several researchers have ... (view more)