At a glance.
- Houseparty updates: no evidence of either hacking or conspiracy, so far.
- Zoom's privacy concerns.
- Secure cloud backup service exposes customer records.
No evidence of hacking or conspiracy (unless it's somewhere in that 12,000-word privacy policy).
TechCrunch offers an update on the Houseparty affair, and its conclusion is that there's no evidence of either a breach or a conspiracy to defame a commercial rival. But there are the customary privacy concerns any free service brings. (The things said in Cupertino when it looks over in the direction of Mountain View come to mind: "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.") Houseparty collects a great deal of information about its users, and it describes how it uses that information in what TechCrunch describes as a “twelve-thousand word privacy policy.” It need hardly be said that many users of an online hangout will not attend to the details of a service’s data-handling policies with any degree of lawyerly rigor. In any case, Houseparty does promise to anonymize and aggregate the data it collects, and there’s no reason to doubt its sincerity of purpose. But data can be toxic, and privacy hawks are made skittish by this kind of collection.
Houseparty and its corporate parent Epic Games have not elaborated on the conspiracy to defame they discerned earlier this week. While in fairness the craziness being bayed by British influencers is certainly far-fetched enough to have been fabricated by conspirators, and while Houseparty surely has competitors, even more eccentric memes have emerged spontaneously in the past. If there's a hand at work here, it's more likely to be the invisible hand of the marketplace-of-bad-ideas than the hidden hand of conspiracy.
Zoom booms, but privacy concerns attend its rise.
Zoom's sharp increase in usage continues to draw increased scrutiny, and miscellaneous privacy cats jump from various privacy bags. TechCrunch reports that researcher Patrick Wardle has found two local security flaws in Zoom's macOS client.
Other privacy issues, which have prompted a class action lawsuit and an inquiry from New York State's Attorney General as well as a letter from the senior Senator from Connecticut, seem to stem, in the view of Recode, from a lack of transparency on Zoom's part.
Secure cloud service experiences a security lapse.
Researchers at vpnMentor report finding a data leak at SOS Online Backup. The secure cloud backup provider is thought to have exposed more than 135 million customer records. The exposure was traceable, the researchers say, to a misconfigured Elasticsearch database.