As the Trump administration’s active immigration policies intensify, people have begun to seriously consider their privacy and security as they cross the United States. This is especially true when it comes to travelers’ phones and other devices, where our customs and Border Protection agents can conduct extensive search rights. Fortunately, there are steps you can take, such as removing certain apps from your personal phone or using an alternative phone that is only used for international travel.
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Administration Efficiency (DOGE) agents drove the Trump administration to the U.S. government system in the first few months. Now it is beginning to understand what these systems are and the data they hold on to American residents. Wired this week details Doge operators of 19 systems only access the Department of Health and Human Services.
Pope Francis died Monday at the age of 88. The death of Supreme Potieve initiated a conference, a secret process for choosing a new pope. To protect the integrity of the meeting and to try to prevent leakage, extensive security measures will be taken to signal and scan the hidden microphone from the privacy film on the Vatican windows.
Google recently announced the initial launch of end-to-end encrypted emails for Google Workspace accounts, which is good news for enterprise-level users’ privacy. When a Workspace user emails a non-workspace account, the recipient receives an invitation to create a guest account so they can read the email. Unfortunately, security experts say this could create new opportunities for phishing attacks as scammers try to lure invitation bait.
But that’s not all. Every week, we fill in security and privacy news that we don’t cover in depth. Click on the headlines to read the full story. And stay safe.
Signal gates are scandals that won’t die – at least if you’re U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, that won’t. On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that Heggs installed signals on his office’s “second computer” so that he could “use signals in a confidential space where his cell phone and other personal electronic devices would not allow them and communicate easily with anyone.”
According to sources who spoke with the AP, the Associated Press added images of the signal usage reported by Hegseth on Thursday, indicating that Hegseth installed a second internet line that connects directly to the public internet rather than through a secure connection from the Pentagon. Heggs allegedly did so, so he could use a second computer where the signal was installed. Then on Friday, the New York Times found that phone numbers related to Hergers’ signal account (the phone he used in that infamous group chat) were easily spotted online, potentially leading him to targeted cyber attacks that hostile countries.
Despite the stable arrests and the evacuation flow of online fraudsters, cybercriminals are still at unprecedented levels and are making more money than ever before. Two reports released this week reveal the stark scale of online crime. Last year in the United States, businesses and individuals lost $16.6 billion to online crimes, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center—that’s the highest figure ever reported and a leap of 33 percent compared to 2023. In 2024, there were 859,532 complaints about potential online crimes, with the FBI saying phishing and spoofing complaints account for 193,000 of them, followed by extension with 86,000 complaints. Investment scams that typically involve cryptocurrencies account for more than $6 billion of total losses, while business email compromise scams result in losses of $2.7 billion.
Around the same time, the UN Office of Drugs and Crime stressed that Southeast Asia’s giant scam compounds (people whose victims of trafficking were forced to defraud) generate $40 billion in profits each year and continue to grow. These industrial-scale scam organizations are often associated with Chinese criminals, using heavily investing scams (sometimes called pig bags) to free people from their savings in life and expand outside the region. “It spreads like cancer,” Benedikt Hofmann, who is a criminal disorder, said in a statement.
Back in 2020, Google announced that its Chrome browser would stop using third-party cookies, the cookie tracks people around the network and will turn to a creepy way to power the advertising business. Google announced the news a few years ago, web browsers such as Safari, Firefox and Brave Ditched Cookies. But this week, after countless turnarounds, efforts to develop alternatives failed and criticized the proposal to replace cookies would benefit Google, the company announced that it would actually keep the tracker in Chrome.
“We have decided to keep our current approach in Chrome to provide users with third-party cookie selection,” wrote Anthony Chavez, Google VP, who works on its privacy sandbox. “As we interact with the ecosystem, including publishers, developers, regulators and the advertising industry, it’s clear that there are different opinions on changes that could affect third-party cookies,” Chavez wrote. Although the U.S. government’s proposal to sell Chrome is part of an antitrust case against the company, it’s still possible to turn off third-party cookies or use privacy-friendly browsers.
