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Three ex-Amazon employees are going public to draw attention to serious data protection problems. In their view, the e-commerce giant does not want to comply with applicable regulations at all. These are very serious allegations that three formerly high-ranking Amazon employees are making to Politico . All three had been responsible for monitoring information security in different units, but too often failed to assert themselves with their notices, warnings and complaints of deficiencies. Ultimately, the employees who had apparently become too critical were removed from the workforce. The whistleblowers' accusations focus on Amazon's retail business. They explicitly point out that Amazon Web Services, the cloud business of the manufacturer, is not affected by the allegations. Rather, the data security concepts used there are world-leading. But the AWS business is largely run apart from the main company anyway, they say, with only a few points of contact. Amazon is said not to k...

After an initial data protection audit, some video service providers have made improvements to their offerings. But the Berlin data protection commissioner still sees serious shortcomings. The State Commissioner for Data Protection in Berlin (Germany), Maja Smoltczyk, advises against using leading video conferencing systems such as Microsoft Teams, Skype, Zoom, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, Teamviewer and Cisco WebEx. The reason is a retest of various offerings. After a number of services had already failed a test of data protection requirements last year, a new test of the major providers did not reveal any substantial improvement. Smoltczyk said that she was pleased "that our comments had persuaded so many providers to improve their offerings, in some cases very significantly, in terms of data protection". There are now enough legally compliant services for a wide range of purposes that there is no reason to break data protection law for video conferencing. However, if a provid...

The head of the social media giant shared internally how the group plans to fight back against the iPhone manufacturer's new privacy rules. The dispute between Apple and Facebook is getting angrier and angrier. In front of members of his team, the head of the social media giant, Mark Zuckerberg, is reported to have said that the iPhone company should be "hurt". This seems to mean, among other things, an antitrust suit that Facebook has been preparing for some time - as well as other measures to harm Apple. For example, according to recent reports, Facebook is planning, among other things, to introduce its own computer watch that will have fitness functions as well as access to Messenger and WhatsApp to counter the Apple Watch. Apple wants to restrict tracking Zuckerberg's threats were leaked to the Wall Street Journal , and Facebook's Watch plans were reported by IT news service The Information . The reason for Facebook's frustration remains Apple's priva...

At the end of 2020, the European Council officially decided to support a project that would enable security authorities to read encrypted data. "Security through encryption and security despite encryption" - that is the official motto. Yet the text of the so-called European Council resolution, number 12863/20, is very vague. Messenger services are in particular focus, as they are suspected of being frequently used by criminals. For investigative authorities, this would fulfill a long-held desire to tap into private encrypted communications and read them. However, other data services are not explicitly excluded. This is precisely the issue at hand, because it makes a difference whether a communication channel is encrypted end-to-end or whether data is encrypted on cloud storage, for example. Regardless of the fact that in the latter scenario it would be negligent anyway to entrust this service to a cloud provider, because companies should always organize their encryption auton...

Microsoft is under fire. The reason is the analysis tool "MyAnalytics", which summarizes various information on the use of Office applications. For data protectionists, this gives reason to worry that employees could be monitored by their bosses. Tech giant Microsoft is facing serious accusations. This involves the use of Office 365 and the "MyAnalytics" analysis tool. As Bild.de reports, the data could probably be used by employers to spy on their own employees. The data would not only summarize how productive an employee is, but also how well they network with others or how quickly they respond to requests. Employee data is anonymized for the tool. However, team leaders and bosses still have access to the data and can make decisions based on it. Recently, concerns were raised about the so-called "Productivity Score," which summarizes the productivity of individual employees. Only after concerns were raised by data protectionists did Microsoft anonymize t...