Top News: GM faces cyberattack, Mastercard’s new biometric checkout system, and more

GM faces credential stuffing attack

General Motors (GM) confirmed a credential stuffing attack on the company that exposed customer’s personal information. The exposed information included names, email addresses, home addresses, usernames and phone numbers of people tied to specific accounts, last known and saved location information, etc. Read More

Chicago Public Schools suffers data breach

The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has suffered a major data breach that compromised the personal information of half a million students and more than 56,000 employees. The data breach was attributed to Battelle for Kids, a tech vendor storing student course information and assessment data. The vendor had faced a ransomware attack in December 2021 on one of its servers used to store CPS student information. Read More

Tim Hortons app tracked user location

Canada's privacy regulator has found that Tim Hortons' mobile app violated the country's privacy laws. The app tracked and recorded user location even when it was not open and amassed a huge amount of highly sensitive information about its customers. Following the regulator’s report, the company has removed a location-tracking technology from its app. Read More

Mastercard launches biometric checkout system

Mastercard has announced the introduction of a biometric checkout system that will allow users to pay at the till with a smile or wave of the hand. The new feature has drawn flak over concerns relating to customer privacy, data storage, crime risk and bias. The system will provide facial recognition-based payments by linking the biometric authentication systems of a number of third-party companies with Mastercard’s own payment systems. Read More

Amazon’s Kindle to stop operations in China

After Airbnb, Yahoo and Microsoft's LinkedIn, Amazon is the latest company to announce the closure of its Kindle e-book store in China. The company will remove the Kindle app from Chinese app stores in 2024 and will stop selling e-books from June 30 next year. Read More