In order to work, the assistant needs access to users’ web activity, including the links and some page content they view. The catch, as Amazon explains in the fine print, is the company can use this data to improve its general marketing, products and services, unrelated to the shopping assistant.

Amazon did not discuss how it uses the data it gathers via the assistant for any unrelated purposes, but a job listing for an affiliated team known as Browser Integration Technologies says the group’s influence “spans across advertising and marketing, pricing and selection.”

The attack is quite simple and doesn’t exploit any technical vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP software, but instead takes advantage of one of the inherent properties of the keyserver network that’s used to distribute certificates.

The OpenPGP specification doesn’t have any upper limit on the number of signatures that a certificate can have, so any user or group of users can add signatures to a given certificate ad infinitum. That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except for the fact that GnuPG, one of the more popular packages that implements the OpenPGP specification, doesn’t handle certificates with extremely large numbers of signatures very well. In fact, GnuPG will essentially stop working when it attempts to import one of those certificates.

“The most impactful way we can improve the experience of delivering music to Spotify for as many artists and labels as possible is to lean into the great work our distribution partners are already doing to serve the artist community,” Spotify said in a statement on its blog.

For example, Billboard points out Little Mix track “Bounce Back” pre-saves prompted giving Sony Music specific permissions. Among them were “view your Spotify account data,” “view your activity on Spotify” and “take actions in Spotify on your behalf.”

Looking forward, executive management at technology-dependent industries—including manufacturing, high-tech and telecom—are increasingly driving toward become 100% cloud-enabled.

Successful cloud migration also requires successfully migrating security to the cloud, enabling organizations to deploy and manage a single, consistent security framework that spans the entire multi-cloud infrastructure.

Google is locking down API access to Gmail data (and later, Drive data) soon, and some of your favorite third-party apps might find themselves locked out of your Google account data. The new API policy was announced back in October, but this week Google started emailing individual users of these apps, telling them the apps will no longer work starting July 15.

One absolute doozy of a requirement kicks in if the app stores user data on a third-party server. Google will now require those apps to pass a third-party security audit, which the app developer must pay for. According to the company, the cost "may range from $15,000 to $75,000 (or more) depending on the size and complexity of the application."

Even though Google launched confidential mode over a year ago, people are still confused about what it does. Is it actually secure or private? Is it encrypted? When you turn it on, does it prevent Google from reading your messages? The answer to these questions is ‘no.’

Without end-to-end encryption, Gmail’s confidential mode is little more than a marketing trick designed to pacify users concerned about privacy.

The cloudy storage outfit is keen to move beyond mere cloud storage to become "a single workspace designed to bring files, fragmented work tools, and teams together".

It is the usual cloud story: prices can change at any time, which means something that is great value when you sign up may not look so good a year or two later.

The disruptions all stemmed from Google Cloud, which suffered a prolonged outage—an outage which also prevented Google engineers from pushing a fix. And so, for an entire afternoon and into the night, the Internet was stuck in a crippling ouroboros: Google couldn’t fix its cloud, because Google’s cloud was broken.

Google says its engineers were aware of the problem within two minutes. And yet! “Debugging the problem was significantly hampered by failure of tools competing over use of the now-congested network,” the company wrote in a detailed postmortem.

The root cause was issues with Google’s Cloud service that powers apps other than just Google’s own web services.

Discord, Snapchat, and Vimeo users are also affected, as these all use Google Cloud on the backend.

The problems for YouTube follow high profile outages for the popular video service in January and October.

"There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy," Facebook counsel Orin Snyder said during a pretrial hearing to dismiss a lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to Law 360.

The company reportedly didn't deny that third parties accessed users' data, but it instead told US District Judge Vince Chhabria that there's no "reasonable expectation of privacy" on Facebook or any other social media site.