With the recent outbreak of Middle Eastern Respitory Syndrom (MERS) in South Korea, officials are taking to tracking people who are quarantined by tracking their smartphones. If someone who is quarantined leaves their quarantine area – and takes their phone with them – public health officials will know.

“How did this store get my email address to send me a Square receipt?” asks a reader. “I paid for something at a new store that had the Square iPad checkout thing. I never gave the store my email address, but within seconds I had an emailed receipt. How the heck did Square get my email address?” laments another. Here’s how.

In the past few years the term “dark social” has come into play, but just what is dark social – what does it mean, and why does it matter (if it does matter)? Here’s the low-down on dark social.

Here is what is going on around the Sony hack tied to Sony’s ‘The Interview’ movie, and the The Interview threat from the Sony hackers. The Interview, with a Christmas release date, sees Seth Rogen and James Franco’s characters going to North Korea to interview North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and convinced by the CIA to take the opportunity to kill Kim Jong Un. Ahead of its release, hackers hacked into Sony, grabbed all sorts of private employee and corporate data, including copies of the movie and other unreleased movies including Annie, Mr. Turner, Fury, and Still Alice, and then issued the following threat, including allusions to 9/11.

Some are calling it Ubergate. Still others call it the reason they will no longer use the Uber service (fortunately there are alternatives to Uber, like Lyft in the U.S., and Hailo in the UK and Ireland). First there was Uber’s ‘Rides of Glory’ (i.e. rides of shame), then came the alleged threat of an “opposition research plan” against journalists to spend $1 million to dig up information on “your personal lives, your families.” And thus #Ubergate was born.

Early today the Senate declassified and made public the Senate Select Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program (or, as some are calling it, the Bush Cheney CIA Torture Report). We know that many of you will be looking for the CIA torture methods report online, and so, we are giving it to you here.

It was inevitable that someone would create a Facebook friends / national sex offender registry mashup. The Facebook Friend Verifier app is that mashup, allowing you to scan all of your Facebook friends, and anybody who friend requests you, to see if they are a registered sex offender listed in the National Sex Offender Registry.

Meet Charlie, the Virtual Meeting Assistant app. The Charlie app’s site says that with Charlie you will “make a killer impression on whoever you’re meeting,” and Business Insider claims that Charlie “wants to give everybody the perks of a personal assistant.” But Charlie comes with a privacy cost.

Recently we discovered that somehow Facebook had started including our location in posts, even though we were sure we had location tagging turned off. So we started searching for how to disable location tracking on Facebook. And guess what. At the time of this writing, there is no way on Facebook to set Location by default to “off”. That’s because you have to turn it off on your computer or smartphone, not on Facebook.

Microsoft has released Microsoft Windows 10 as a “Windows Technical Preview”. That means that it is sort of like a beta version of Windows 10, out for testing in the real world. And yes, as part of this, they include what can be described as key-logging, or a key-logger, meaning that your keystrokes – the characters that you type – are recorded as you are typing them.

MIT grad student Abe Davis, along with colleagues, has demonstrated the ability to eavesdrop by reading the vibrations on objects such as a potato chip bag. Dubbed the “Visual Microphone”, Davis was able to use a regular digital camera to perform this feat. Which means that someone could appear to be filming the table next to you, but are actually about to decode what you are saying. Davis, along with MIT professors Frédo Durand and Bill Freeman, have also used this method to eavesdrop on the vibrations in a glass of water, and even on the leafs of a potted plant.

A recent rebroadcast on 60 Minutes about data brokers raises an interesting question: is dating site OK Cupid selling your answers to their questions, along with enough information to personally identify you, such as your IP address?

Canvas fingerprinting has been on the news a lot lately, described as the alternative to Internet tracking cookies that is impossible to turn off. But it’s actually not that hard to block canvas fingerprinting.

Behavioral advertising, also known as behavioral targeting or behavioral marketing, is when an advertiser or advertising server hooks into the data that is stored by your browser or app, to serve you interested based ads. These things tell the advertisers and networks things such as what searches you recently conducted, what sites you visited, etc.. Behavioral advertising is increasingly being used by advertisers and their publishers (Facebook just announced they are using behavioral advertising), and consumers are becoming increasingly concerned for their privacy. So how can you opt-out of behavioral advertising?

Facebook says that they are “improving Facebook ads” – but for whom? For themselves, of course, because remember, you are not Facebook’s customer – you are their commodity. This new development means that Facebook is now using what is known as ‘behavioral advertising’ (when it’s on their website), or ‘remarketing’ (if their ads are following you around). Basically Facebook is using your data from your browser use – and your mobile app use – when you are not on Facebook – to target ads to you.