Month: February 2019

Popular iOS Apps found to be recording user’s screens / sometimes exposing private data

CompuScoop Staff February 7, 2019 0

An investigation by TechCrunch.com revealed that some iPhone apps are using services to record user's screens from companies like Glassbox which claim to be a “customer experience analytics firm” to track user's experiences when inside an app.

Glassbox is one of the so-called analytics firms that employ “session replay technology.” This allows developers to record displays and review how users interacted with their app. “Every tap, button push, and keyboard entry is recorded,” TechCrunch says.

These session replays let app developers record the screen and play them back to see how its users interacted with the app to figure out if something didn’t work or if there was an error. Every tap, button push and keyboard entry is recorded — effectively screenshotted — and sent back to the app developers.

In a recent tweet, Glassbox said: “Imagine if your website or mobile app could see exactly what your customers do in real time, and why they did it?”

Further, The App Analyst recently discovered that the Air Canada iPhone app doesn’t properly mask session replays. This means sensitive information like passport numbers and credit card information is easily viewable to Air Canada employees. While this isn’t the case for all of the apps, Air Canada recently suffered a data breach affecting 20,000 user profiles, which doesn’t bode well for its security practices.

In some cases, apps send session replay data directly back to Glassbox servers, while some companies send it back to their own servers. In both cases, some data was found unmasked and easily accessible with man-in-the-middle tools:

To read the rest of the 9to5Mac article, click here.

Wells Fargo suffering system-wide outage

Dan Uff February 7, 2019 0

BREAKING: Wells Fargo is suffering a system-wide outrage with its online banking and main web site, according to Fox Business.

Customers currently cannot obtain financial information from the company's web site, and telephone services.

Apple to remove ‘Do Not Track’ feature in Safari for something else

CompuScoop Staff February 7, 2019 0

“Amid a decline in adoption by websites, Apple has revealed that it will remove support for ‘Do Not Track’ in Safari 12.1,” Chance Miller reports for 9to5Mac.

“As detailed in a blog post from DuckDuckGo, Do Not Track’s mission of helping users avoid having their activity tracked has largely failed,” Miller reports. “Apple, meanwhile, is shifting focus to its new Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature.”

“Do Not Track was original designed to ‘a special signal to websites, analytics companies, ad networks, plug in providers, and other web services you encounter while browsing, to stop tracking your activity,'” Miller reports. “The issue, however, is that it simply sends a voluntary signal that websites aren’t forced to follow.”

Read more in the full article here.

The iPad is making Life Easier for people in Public Housing

Dan Uff February 7, 2019 0

C|Net.com: For millions around the world, public housing offers the promise of a much-needed roof overhead.

But the reality of public housing can be grim, and problems that start small can often become bureaucratic nightmares.

That might be a case of waiting weeks to get a broken door fixed or having to file repeated complaints about rowdy neighbours. But issues can be left to fester if councils ignore public housing tenants. And in some cases, as the world saw with the massive fire at London's Grenfell Tower housing complex in 2017, that can have tragic consequences.

While governments can be notoriously slow to adapt, one community housing provider is using tech to catch potential problems before they become big issues, making life easier for some of the most vulnerable people in society.

That solution is the Ivy app.

Created by the NSW Department of Family and Community Services (FACS) in Australia, this iOS app was developed to cut out the endless paperwork case workers and community housing residents need to complete to get basic things done.

It lets case workers fill property condition reports and take photos directly on an iPad, while also accessing family records, past incidents or safety issues and recent rent and water bills. Residents can complete forms and make payments on the spot, without having to visit a FACS office or wait an age on the phone to get connected to a call centre.

And it's all done through an iPad, which holds records of all the properties and families a case worker deals with, letting them map out appointments and access any information with a tap of the screen.

To read the rest of the article, click here.