For almost five decades, the United States has guided the growth of the Internet. From its origins as a small Pentagon program to its status as a global platform that connects more than half of the world’s population and tens of billions of devices, the Internet has long been an American project. Yet today, the United States has ceded leadership in cyberspace to China. Chinese President Xi Jinping has outlined his plans to turn China into a “cyber-superpower.” Already, more people in China have access to the Internet than in any other country, but Xi has grander plans. Through domestic regulations, technological innovation, and foreign policy, China aims to build an “impregnable” cyberdefense system, give itself a greater voice in Internet governance, foster more world-class companies, and lead the globe in advanced technologies.

Internet giants have more personal information than any intelligence agency has ever had or should have, according to a former director of GCHQ.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal of early 2018, when it was revealed the personal data of millions of Facebook users had been harvested without their consent and used to target them with political advertising, sparked the outrage of users, lawmakers, privacy advocates, and media pundits.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday warned patients, providers and manufacturers about cybersecurity vulnerabilities in certain medical devices and health care networks.

China is taking every measure it can to verify the identities of its over 850 million mobile internet users.

France is poised to become the first European country to use facial recognition technology to give citizens a secure digital identity -- whether they want it or not.

Stop bragging about how many megapixels your snazzy new prosumer DSLR camera has – China has beaten you to it. Researchers there have just announced a 500mp camera. Rather than taking stunning vacation photos, though, one of the most likely uses for this wide-angle, beer crate-sized device is for identifying people dozens of meters away using facial recognition.

On July 23, in a keynote address at the International Conference on Cyber Security at Fordham University, US Attorney General William Barr took up a banner that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation have been waving for over a decade: the call for what former FBI director James Comey had referred to as a "golden key."

The pernicious growth of the surveillance state continues with the imminent rollout of live facial recognition cameras across Britain. That is why this week I signed a statement, alongside a cross-party group of MPs, experts and civil liberties campaigners, calling for a halt to facial recognition trials to give parliament the chance to debate it properly. There is a point at which crime-fighting measures cease to challenge the guilty and become a threat to the innocent. That point has come with unfettered facial recognition.

AdaptiveMobile Security have uncovered a new and previously undetected vulnerability and associated exploits, called Simjacker. This vulnerability is currently being actively exploited by a specific private company that works with governments to monitor inpiduals.

PAUL WALLICH usually walks his small son to the bus stop a stone’s throw from their Vermont home. But he can use a robot too: a football-sized drone, hovering several metres off the ground, follows a beacon stashed in the little boy’s school bag. A smartphone strapped to the device beams back video.

Our personal tech columnist asked security researchers what they could find out about him from just his cellphone number. Quite a lot, it turns out.

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users’ phone numbers were exposed in an open online database, the company confirmed Wednesday, in the latest example of Facebook’s past privacy lapses coming back to haunt its users.

Chinese authorities have begun deploying a new surveillance tool: “gait recognition” software that uses people’s body shapes and how they walk to identify them, even when their faces are hidden from cameras.