 Looking to use your phone in an emergency? Modern smartphones and smartwatches allow you to set certain features that will ping your last known location to emergency contacts in a situation where you’re unable to talk on the phone. Both Apple and Google have baked these features into the respective iOS and Android platforms, and we’re seeing more and more wearable manufacturers include the features too. Why would you want to set up emergency SOS location tracking? There’s a variety of scenarios where you may not be able to talk on a phone, but you will be able to find a way to send your location to trusted individuals. You can also have an easy way to directly call the emergency services through these features too, so they’re worth setting up for when you may need them in the future. This guide will teach you how to set up the equivalent features on your iPhone, Android phone, or an alternative such as wearables from Garmin and Apple. Not all fitness trackers or wearables sport these features, but most smartphones do. Emergency SOS is already available when you take an iPhone out of the box, but there are some ways you can set it up to work better. It works in all countries, but in some places, you may only be able to choose one particular emergency service. First off, making an emergency services call is simple from an iPhone, but the way it works differs depending on the model of iPhone you have. If you own an iPhone 8 or later (that’s if your phone came out after 2017) you can hold down the side button and the volume buttons. Then, you’ll find a slider on the screen that says “Emergency SOS”. If you drag this across, it’ll make an immediate call to the emergency services. If you can’t slide this across, continue to hold down the buttons and you’ll find your phone makes an alert noise with a countdown. That countdown will finish with the phone calling the emergency services, so this is particularly useful if you can’t take your phone out of a pocket. We would encourage you to set up emergency contacts (more on that below) as it will then message your contacts immediately afterward with your location information and more. Why would you want an emergency contact? First off, it can help emergency services identify who to contact, and on Apple devices, these people will immediately receive a message of your location after your call with the emergency services. To set this up, click on the Health app and press on the profile picture. In here, you’ll find an option called Medical ID and at the bottom of the page, you’ll find an option called emergency contacts. Here is where you can enter the information of the contact, a relationship, and their phone number as well. Tap on done afterward, and you’ve set up your emergency contact. You can have several of these on your iPhone at one time. On Android phones, these features differ depending on the manufacturer. You can often find the information you need by searching in your phone’s Settings for phrases such as SOS messages or simply the word emergency. For example, Samsung phones have a feature called Send SOS Messages that allows you to press the side key three times to automatically message someone with your location. It will automatically attach pictures using your rear and front camera, as well as an audio recording of the moments before the message was sent. For more detailed instructions on various devices visit OUR FORUM.  Today, researchers have exposed common weaknesses lurking in the latest smart sex toys that can be exploited by attackers. As more as more adult toy brands enter the market, given that the COVID-19 situation has led to a rapid increase in sex toy sales, researchers believe a discussion around the security of these devices is vital. In examples provided by the researchers, technologies like Bluetooth and inadequately secured remote APIs make these IoT personal devices vulnerable to attacks that go beyond just compromising user privacy. ESET security researchers Denise Giusto Bilić and Cecilia Pastorino have shed light on some weaknesses lurking in smart sex toys, including the newer models. The main concern highlighted by the researchers is, that newer wearables like smart sex toys are equipped with many features such as online conferencing, messaging, internet access, and Bluetooth connectively. This increased connectivity also opens doors to these devices being taken over and abused by attackers. The researchers explain most of these smart devices feature two channels of connectivity. Firstly, the connectivity between a smartphone user and the device itself is established over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), with the user running the smart toy's app. Secondly, the communication between a remotely located sexual partner and the app controlling the device is established over the internet. To bridge the gap between one's distant lover and the sex toy user, smart sex toys, like any other IoT device, use servers with API endpoints handling the requests. "In some cases, this cloud service also acts as an intermediary between partners using features like chat, videoconferencing and file transfers, or even giving remote control of their devices to a partner," explained Bilić and Pastorino in a report. But, the researchers state that the information processed by sex toys consists of highly sensitive data such as names, sexual orientation, gender, a list of sexual partners, private photos and videos, among other pieces, which, if leaked can adversely compromise a user's privacy. This is especially true if sextortion scammers get creative after getting their hands on such private information. More importantly, though, the researchers express concern over these IoT devices being compromised and weaponized by the attackers for malicious actions, or to physically harm the user. This can, for example, happen if the sex toy gets overheated. "And finally, what are the consequences of someone being able to take control of a sexual device without consent, while it is being used, and send different commands to the device?" "Is an attack on a sexual device sexual abuse and could it even lead to a sexual assault charge?" Bilić and Pastorino further stress. To demonstrate the seriousness of these weaknesses, the researchers conducted proof-of-concept exploits on the Max by Lovense and We-Vibe Jive smart sex toys. Both of these devices were found to use the least secure "Just Works" method of Bluetooth pairing. Using the BtleJuice framework, and two BLE dongles, the researchers were able to demonstrate how a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacker could take control of the devices and capture the packets. The attacker can then re-broadcast these packets after tampering with them to change settings like vibration mode, intensity, and even inject their other commands. Likewise, the API endpoints used to connect a remote lover (sexual partner) to the user make use of a token which wasn't awfully hard to brute-force. Want more visit OUR FORUM.  After spending more than a decade building up massive profits off targeted advertising, Google announced on Wednesday that it’s planning to do away with any sort of individual tracking and targeting once the cookie is out of the picture. In a lot of ways, this announcement is just Google’s way of doubling down on its long-running pro-privacy proclamations, starting with the company’s initial 2020 pledge to eliminate third-party cookies in Chrome by 2022. The privacy-protective among us can agree that killing off these sorts of omnipresent trackers and targeters is a net good, but it’s not time to start cheering the privacy bona fides of a company built on our data—as some were inclined to do after Wednesday’s announcement. As the cookie-kill date creeps closer and closer, we’ve seen a few major names in the data-brokering and adtech biz—shady third parties that profit off of cookies—try to come up with a sort of “universal identifier” that could serve as a substitute once Google pulls the plug. In some cases, these new IDs rely on people’s email logins that get hashed and collectively scooped up from tons of sites across the web. In other cases, companies plan to flesh out the scraps of a person’s identifiable data with other data that can be pulled from non-browser sources, like their connected television or mobile phones. There are tons of other schemes that these companies are coming up with amid the cookie countdown, and apparently, Google’s having none of it. “We continue to get questions about whether Google will join others in the ad tech industry who plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers,” David Temkin, who heads Google’s product management team for “Ads Privacy and Trust,” wrote in a blog post published on Wednesday. In response, Temkin noted that Google doesn’t believe that “these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions.” Based on that, these sorts of products “aren’t a sustainable long term investment,” he added, noting that Google isn’t planning on building “alternate identifiers to track individuals” once the cookie does get quashed. What Google does plan on building, though, is its own slew of “privacy-preserving” tools for ad targeting, like its Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC for short. Just to get people up to speed: While cookies (and some of these planned universal ID’s) track people by their individual browsing behavior as they bounce from site to site, under FLoC, a person’s browser would take any data generated by that browsing and basically plop it into a large pot of data from people with similar browsing behavior—a “flock,” if you will. Instead of being able to target ads against people based on the individual morsels of data a person generates, Google would allow advertisers to target these giant pots of aggregated data. We’ve written out our full thoughts on FLoC before—the short version is that like the majority of Google’s privacy pushes that we’ve seen until now, the FLoC proposal isn’t as user-friendly as you might think. For one thing, others have already pointed out that this proposal doesn’t necessarily stop people from being tracked across the web, it just ensures that Google’s the only one doing it. This is one of the reasons that the upcoming cookiepocolypse has already drawn scrutiny from competition authorities over in the UK. Meanwhile, some American trade groups have already loudly voiced their suspicions that what Google’s doing here is less about privacy and more about tightening its obscenely tight grip on the digital ad economy. To learn more turn your attention to OUR FORUM.
|
Latest Articles
|