[ DuckDuckGo Privacy Weekly ] For Apr 15, 2021

• Data from 553M Facebook Users Dumped Online: How to See If You Are Impacted [zdnet.com]
  Facebook's data leak exposed "names, birthdays, gender, location and more, with each dataset made freely available online." If so, beware of potential phishing scams and fraudulent calls.
  You can check if your data was leaked haveibeenpwned.com.
• Amazon Delivery Drivers Forced to Sign 'Biometric Consent' Form or Lose Job [vice.com]
  Give up your biometric data or lose your job? Lauren Kaori Gurley on the dystopian ultimatum facing Amazon drivers.
• A South Korean Chatbot Shows Just How Sloppy Tech Companies Can Be With User Data [slate.com]
  A South Korean app collected lovers' intimate exchanges without informing users and then used the data to build a conversational A.I. chatbot. This "incident of personal data misuse [clearly shows] what can go wrong and how consumers can fight back."
• How to Protect Your Privacy While Signing Up for a Covid-19 Vaccine Online [popsci.com]
  Signing up for a vaccine appointment online? "A jaw-dropping number of ad trackers and cookies appear on 29 US state vaccine websites." But don't worry — if you sign up using our mobile app or browser extension, you'll have tracker immunity too!
• The Case for — and Against — Breaking Up Google [vox.com]
  On the season finale of the Land of the Giants podcast, Shirin Ghaffary and Alex Kantrowitz chat with our CEO and Founder Gabriel Weinberg about how regulators can actually make competition one click away.

Our thoughts

• Use the DuckDuckGo Extension to Block FLoC, Google’s New Tracking Method in Chrome [spreadprivacy.com]
  Google has created a new tracking mechanism called FLoC that will replace third-party cookies. However, despite not phasing out third-party cookies until 2023, Google has already put FLoC into Chrome and automatically turned it on for millions of users. This is bad for privacy and we've taken action by being the first to implement a FLoC blocker, adding it to our DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension for Chrome by enhancing our existing tracker blocker.
  
  FLoC groups you based on your interests and demographics, derived from your browsing history, to enable creepy advertising and other content targeting without third-party cookies. As such, it continues to facilitate the manipulation, discrimination, and filter bubbles synonymous with such targeting. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have called it a "terrible idea" and implored Google "please don't do this." We agree with their assessment, especially since users aren’t given a clear and explicit choice to opt-in. That's why we updated our extension and implemented a FLoC opt-out on DuckDuckGo Search on duckduckgo.com.

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