An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Patients sitting in emergency rooms, at chiropractors’ offices and at pain clinics in the Philadelphia area may start noticing on their phones the kind of messages typically seen along highway billboards and public transit: personal injury law firms looking for business by casting mobile online ads at patients. The potentially creepy part? They’re only getting fed the ad because somebody knows they are in an emergency room. The technology behind the ads, known as geofencing, or placing a digital perimeter around a specific location, has been deployed by retailers for years to offer coupons and special offers to customers as they shop. Bringing it into health care spaces, however, is raising alarm among privacy experts.

Law firms and marketing companies from Tennessee to California are also testing out the technology in hospital settings. “Is everybody in an emergency room going to need an attorney? Absolutely not,” Kakis says. “But people that are going to need a personal injury attorney are more than likely at some point going to end up in an emergency room.” The advertisers identify someone’s location by grabbing what is known as “phone ID” from Wi-Fi, cell data or an app using GPS. Once someone crosses the digital fence, Kakis says, the ads can show up for more than a month — and on multiple devices.

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Source: Slashdot – Lawyers Are Sending Mobile Ads To Patients Sitting In Emergency Rooms

The computer hacker who worked with Russian spies was sentenced to five years in prison Tuesday for his role in a massive security breach at Yahoo. “U.S. Judge Vince Chhabria also fined Karim Baratov $250,000 during a sentencing hearing in San Francisco,” The Associated Press reports. From the report: Baratov, 23, pleaded guilty in November to nine felony hacking charges. He acknowledged in his plea agreement that he began hacking as a teen seven years ago and charged customers $100 per hack to access web-based emails. Prosecutors allege he was “an international hacker for hire” who indiscriminately hacked for clients he did not know or vet, including dozens of jobs paid for by Russia’s Federal Security Service. Baratov, who was born in Kazakhstan but lived in Toronto, Canada, where he was arrested last year, charged customers to obtain another person’s webmail passwords by tricking them to enter their credentials into a fake password reset page. Prosecutors said Russian security service hired Baratov to target dozens of email accounts using information obtained from the Yahoo hack.

“Deterrence is particularly important in a case like this,” the judge said during the hearing. He rejected prosecutors call for a prison sentence of nearly 10 years, noting Baratov’s age and clean criminal record prior to his arrest. Baratov has been in custody since his arrest last year. He told the judge Tuesday that his time behind bars has been “a very humbling and eye-opening experience.” He apologized to those he hacked and promised “to be a better man” and obey the law upon his release. The judge said it is likely Baratov will be deported once he is released from prison.

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Source: Slashdot – Canadian Hacker Sentenced To 5 Years For Yahoo Security Breach

According to MarketWatch’s Leslie Albrecht, people are using the peer-to-peer payment app Venmo to find out if their spouse is cheating. Some are even saying the app is more effective than Facebook at this sort of investigation. “What you’re seeing on Instagram or Facebook is what they want you to see,” said Abby Faber, a 19-year-old freshman at Indiana University. “They’re edited pictures that they put up. But with Venmo, it’s very normal casual interactions. It’s what they were doing and spending money on.” From the report: Some users seem to forget that their transactions are public by default, and their payment activity provides an unfiltered paper trail of what’s really happening in their lives. In [Faber’s] case, she checked up on her ex-boyfriend and saw he was spending money on pizza and the popular video game Fortnite — and making regular payments to one girl, who Faber guessed is his new hook-up.

Venmo has had a social component since it launched in 2009. Users see a feed of both their own friends’ payments and total strangers’ activity every time they open the app, and it’s easy to look up users. Exact amounts aren’t listed, but you can see who’s paying who and which words or emoji they use to describe the payment. The social feed is Venmo’s “secret sauce,” said Erin Mackey, a spokeswoman for Venmo and its parent company PayPal. In fact, it’s usually the reason people are logging on. “Our most active users check Venmo daily and the average user checks Venmo two to three times per week — and it’s not for payments, but to see what their friends and family are doing.” The report mentions a settlement Venmo reached with the FTC last year over its public-by-default social component. The FTC accused (PDF) Venmo of “misleading” users about the fact that they needed to change two separate privacy settings to make their transactions completely private. “Venmo reached a settlement with the FTC, and a company spokesperson noted that users now have three options for controlling who can see their payments,” reports MarketWatch.

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Source: Slashdot – People Are Using Venmo To Spy On Cheating Spouses