The Washington Post and 16 media partners report Israeli NSO Group’s Pegasus military-grade spyware was used to hack smartphones of select journalists, rights activists and business executives. The story, which NSO Group disputes, says these were included on a list of 50,000+ numbers concentrated in countries that surveil private citizens.
The central bank in South Asia has directed Mastercard to notify all card-issuing banks and non-banks that it can no longer issue credit, debit or prepaid cards to new customers. Mastercard is the third, following American Express and Diners Club, found noncompliant with India’s data storage rules.
Yelp doesn’t rely on surveillance-based advertising, but they’d like to change that. They have launched a program to target ads at Yelp visitors on non-Yelp platforms based on their Yelp activities. Yelp will serve the ads, so there’s not enough data sharing to break most privacy rules. Consumers may not agree: this recent Jebbit study found 53% of people object to personalized emails based on data they haven’t knowingly shared.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.