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Google announced big changes to its most legally fraught set of user settings: your location data. Google's misleading Location History descriptions in Google Maps have earned it several lawsuits in the US and worldwide. A quick count involves individual lawsuits in California , Arizona , Washington , a joint lawsuit in Texas, Indiana, and the District of Columbia , and another joint lawsuit across 40 additional US states. Internationally, Google has also been sued in Australia over its location settings. The point is that any change to Google's location settings must have some motive behind it, so bear with us while we try to decode everything.

Google's big new location data change is a new, duplicate data store that will live exclusively on your device. Google's new blog post says data for the long-running Google Maps Timeline feature will now "be saved right on your device—giving you even more control over your data." That's right, one of the world's biggest Internet data companies advocates for local storage of your location data.

The company continues, "If you’re getting a new phone or are worried about losing your existing one, you can always choose to back up your data to the cloud so it doesn’t get lost. We’ll automatically encrypt your backed-up data so no one can read it, including Google." Users will apparently have lots of control over this new locally stored data, with Google saying, "Soon, you’ll be able to see all your recent activity on Maps... in one central place, and easily delete your searches, directions, visits, and shares with just a few taps. The ability to delete place-related activity from Maps starts rolling out on Android and iOS in the coming weeks."

Enlarge / Your car's maker can collect data on you from many different sources. (credit: Getty Images)

Today, the Mozilla Foundation published its analysis of how well automakers handle the privacy of data collected by their connected cars, and the results will be unlikely to surprise any regular reader of Ars Technica. The researchers were horrified by their findings , stating that "cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy."

Mozilla looked at 25 car brands and found that all of them collected too much personal data, and from multiple sources—monitoring not just which buttons you push or what you do in any of the infotainment system's apps but also data from other sources like satellite radio or third-party maps. Or even when you connect your phone—remember that prompt asking you if you wanted to share all your contacts and notes with your car when you connected it via Bluetooth?

While some gathered data seems innocuous or even helpful—feedback to improve cabin ergonomics and UIs, for example—some data is decidedly not.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

After the Federal Trade Commission launched a probe into Twitter over privacy concerns, Twitter’s negotiations with the FTC do not seem to be going very well. Last week, it was revealed that Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s request last year for a meeting with FTC Chair Lina Khan was rebuffed . Now, a senior Twitter lawyer, Christian Dowell—who was closely involved in those FTC talks—has resigned, several people familiar with the matter told The New York Times .

Dowell joined Twitter in 2020 and rose in the ranks after several of Twitter’s top lawyers exited or were fired once Musk took over the platform in the fall of 2022, Bloomberg reported . Most recently, Dowell—who has not yet confirmed his resignation—oversaw Twitter’s product legal counsel. In that role, he was “intimately involved” in the FTC negotiations, sources told the Times, including coordinating Twitter’s responses to FTC inquiries.

The FTC has overseen Twitter’s privacy practices for more than a decade after it found that the platform failed to safeguard personal information and issued a consent order in 2011. The agency launched its current probe into Twitter’s operations after Musk began mass layoffs that seemed to introduce new security concerns, AP News reported . The Times reported that the FTC's investigation intensified after security executives quit Twitter over concerns that Musk might be violating the FTC's privacy decree.

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If you’ve ever worried about the privacy of your sensitive data when seeking a computer or phone repair, a new study suggests you have good reason. It found that privacy violations occurred at least 50 percent of the time, not surprisingly with female customers bearing the brunt.

Researchers at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, recovered logs from laptops after receiving overnight repairs from 12 commercial shops. The logs showed that technicians from six of the locations had accessed personal data and that two of those shops also copied data onto a personal device. Devices belonging to females were more likely to be snooped on, and that snooping tended to seek more sensitive data, including both sexually revealing and non-sexual pictures, documents, and financial information.

Blown away

“We were blown away by the results,” Hassan Khan, one of the researchers, said in an interview. Especially concerning, he said, was the copying of data, which happened during repairs for one from a male customer and the other from a female. “We thought they would just look at [the data] at most.”

Enlarge (credit: VCG / Contributor | Visual China Group )

Millions of Americans share data daily on the video-streaming app TikTok—data the federal government considers a national security risk because the app is owned by China, a foreign adversary. Now it has been left up to President Joe Biden to figure out a way to minimize the national security risks without forcing the sale of TikTok or taking away one of America’s favorite apps, as former President Donald Trump tried and failed to do in 2020.

Today, The New York Times reported that Biden may be close to arriving at a potential solution to the TikTok problem. “Four people with knowledge of the discussions” told NYT that over the past few months, the Biden administration has drafted a preliminary agreement with TikTok “to resolve national security concerns.”

Because the negotiation is confidential, all sources requested anonymity, and not much is yet known about the terms. However, there are three main areas of change in the current draft. The first focuses on preventing China-based employees from accessing American data by storing all TikTok data solely on US servers. The second is designed to block Chinese propaganda or disinformation campaigns by granting US-based Oracle power to monitor what’s recommended by algorithms. The last provides some oversight by forming a TikTok board of security experts that oversees TikTok’s US operations and reports directly to the US government. (Oracle declined to comment to NYT and did not immediately respond to Ars.)