tracking

Hey guys. I was on the road pretty much all of 2019 for work and had little to no to time to play with my Rift CV1. In the flurry of software updates (and one hardware update) that I managed to do in my time home, something about my 3-sensor setup broke. Once every three to seven seconds, my...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that apps are sending sensitive information to Facebook through the Facebook SDK. The Facebook SDK makes it easy for app writers to share information with Facebook through a built-in analytics service called "App Events." 17.6% of the apps on Apple's App...

China has devised a facial-recognition smart lock that allows the government to crackdown on illegal subletting in public housing. Like most countries, China has limited space and resources to dedicate to public housing for older and poor citizens. In many instances, these tenants are illegally...

Todd Haselton of CNBC has written a guide on how to disable location services for apps to keep them from tracking your location. His guide covers the iPhone and Android ecosystems. For example, there are options in the menus to completely disable location services or to only enable it for...

The NY Times is reporting on mobile apps that track your movements after users agree to enable location services to get local news, weather, and other information. These apps collect data from a user every 2 seconds or up to 14,000 times a day for the purpose of selling the data to hedge funds...

Mastercard and Microsoft have joined forces to promote the concept of a global digital identity. This global digital identity would track you, your purchases and travel around the world as it would effectively replace other forms of ID. Mastercard makes the case that it is a hardship for people...

Google has created new, exciting patents to eavesdrop on your home environment. One patent will scan your home and identify items in your home. So if you have a shirt from a favorite artist in your closet, it will recommend tickets to see them live. It can scan your closet to learn your taste in...

Facebook has been awarded a patent that would allow it to track real life encounters between its users. It will use the Bluetooth connectivity and other hardware on phones to track, log and find other users in the same vicinity. It will be able to read gyro data to determine that the users...

Apple CEO Tim Cook's impassioned speech at a privacy conference in Brussels slammed data collection companies for committing surveillance on their users to fuel oppressive regimes and monetary gains from selling private user data. Tim Cook says, "We shouldn't sugarcoat the consequences. This is...

The intentions of app developers are difficult to gauge sometimes. They can invent wonderful software that makes you wonder how you ever lived without it, or they can create privacy nightmares at the same time. Adjust, AppsFlyer, MoEngage, Localytics, and CleverTap are app developers that...

Walmart has patented a shopping cart with a biometrics sensor equipped in the handle. A server will be able to monitor a customer's baseline readings, from their current readings, in real-time to find out if a customer needs an associate to check on them. Biometric data that can be monitored...

Smart clothes are becoming ever more sophisticated annually. These "wearables" can track how many times we have worn them. Many have Bluetooth connections that allow them to connect to the internet to report where we are headed and have been. The next generation of smart shirts will contain...

Google allegedly purchases data from Mastercard pertaining to the purchase history of its 2 billion cardholders. They then cross-referenced it with Google's own online advertising tracking to learn how Mastercard cardholders viewed and reacted to, online advertising from Google in relation to...

Since 2016, welfare fraud investigators in Sacramento, California have been using the automated license plate recognition (ALPR) system to track welfare recipients to prove fraud. The Department of Human Assistance (DHA) didn't notify the public of this as required by Senate Bill 34, until the...

MIcrosoft HoloLens hasn't gotten off to the fastest start as the device has been relegated to researchers, developers and limited industrial uses. At the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Microsoft gave a demo of the recently released Research Mode which allows developers...

Tommy Hilfiger's new XPLORE lineup of clothing will be equipped with smart chip technology to track when and where you wear your clothing. It will seamlessly interface with an iOS app to allow Tommy Hilfiger to reward you for walking past their clothing locations and other places of interest on...

A Microsoft blog called out elected governmental officials to draft laws that would regulate the usage of facial recognition technology. They stressed the need for the development of norms based on acceptable uses. Microsoft gave examples such as government tracking of citizens over the course...

Hey all. Hoping someone with more computer science book learnin' can explain why my Rift keeps taking a dump on me. I'm doing room scale HMD + sensors, so 1 HDMI and 4 USB ports total (at least 3 USB 3.0 ports, ideally). Currently running into the issue on my Gigabyte Pheonix SLI x99 with my...

China insists on living up to 1984 and their latest regulation is for RFID chips to be in every new car (WARNING auto play video) starting in 2019. Of course these chips are just in the cars to help with their huge traffic problems and would never be used to monitor their citizens. However, with...

There is about to be a little more light shined on just how accessible you are to physically tracking through your smartphone. If your location data can be shared through a paid for service to law enforcement through the Securus Technologies company without a warrant, that is a bit scary. But...

Apple has begun cracking down on apps that share location data with third-parties, by removing the application in question, and informing developers that their app violates two parts of their guidelines. 9to5Mac is reporting that they have seen several cases of Apple cracking down on...

"Hard Questions: What Data Does Facebook Collect When I’m Not Using Facebook, and Why?" Is this a hard question because Facebook does not know the answer, or it knows the answer and it does not want to tell you? When does Facebook get data about people from other websites and apps? Many...

Everyone knows that the built-in login managers that some people use to speed up login on oft-visited sites is vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks that can result in username and password being stolen. Now there's a new exploit that's going around and web trackers are using it to track...

An international team of astronomers led by NASA scientists successfully completed the first global exercise using a real asteroid to test global response capabilities. However, I'm not sure this is good news for the public as a whole. Do you really want to know the next large scale extinction...

Samsung is launching a new device called the Samsung Connect Tag. There are others already out there, Tile and the Orbit Card, to name a couple, but the Samsung Connect Tag is different because it is the first to utilize a narrow band design that combines GPS, Cell ID and Wi-Fi-based...

Facebook has a clever way to figure out what apps to build next. The social network reportedly has an internal system that tracks up-and-coming apps to decide what ideas to copy from smaller startups and companies, according to a report in the WSJ. Using technology from Onavo, an Israeli startup...

StarTrackerVR can track any object within a large designated environment, using small reflective stickers placed on the ceiling. UK-based Mo-Sys Engineering is targeting broadcasters with the new technology. The system can be adapted to any currently available headset, and scales to nearly any...

Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash recently made a blog post highlighting some amazing technology being developed by the Oculus team, as well as his thoughts about VR moving into the future. Technologies shown here include adaptive optics, eye, facial, and skeletal tracking, and advanced hand...

It used to shock me how facebook suggested me the exact same people I met for the first time. It has happened to me for 4 times as much as I can remember. It was on the same day. Any way, I personally have some privacy concerns which is the reason why these things actually shocked me more than...

I have an Asus X99 Deluxe II motherboard running Win 10 Anv update. The M/B uses the AsMedia USB controller and I have had nothing but trouble tracking the Vive headset and controllers. They are constantly losing tracking. I found an few posts on reddit about tracking problems and bought the...

Valve is opening up its Vive VR trackers to custom hardware Pretty cool...probably could see Touch-like controllers on the Vive. Definitely more reason to pick up a Vive.