Still A Problem Six Years Later | The Cat Herder, Volume 4, Issue 7

Under the plan, America Movil, AT&T Inc and other carriers would be responsible for collecting customers’ data, including fingerprints or eye biometrics, to submit to a registry managed by Mexico’s telecoms regulator.

Many of those countries which do retain biometric data have questionable records on human rights, including China, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. No Western countries collect biometric data from cellphone users.

El Reg has reviewed evidence showing the firm seemed more concerned with knowledge of the flaws being made public than with remediation, similar to last week’s Footfallcam debacle (where Kao’s fellow Footfallcam Ltd director, Edward Wong, threatened an infosec bod with a police report unless he deleted Twitter criticism of another product’s poor design). While there were no specific threats made, it appeared removing this criticism was of greater importance to the company than fixing its product’s security shortcomings, which seemingly were still a problem six years later.

European consumer organization BEUC has filed a complaint to the European Commission against TikTok, a Chinese short video sharing platform. National consumer organizations in European countries have also alerted their respective authorities, asking them to investigate the company.

Oracle representatives have marketed the company’s data analytics for use by police and security industry contractors across China, according to dozens of company documents hosted on its website. In at least two cases, the documents imply that provincial departments used the software in their operations.