Monthly Archives: August 2020

Microsoft has announced that it will reduce support for Microsoft 365 on Internet Explorer 11, and will kill off its old Edge browser.

From 30 November 2020, Microsoft Teams will no longer be supported on Internet Explorer. From 17 August 2021 all other Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer be supported.

As well as the reduction of support for those still using Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft will also end support for its older Edge (Legacy) browser on 9 March 2021. Microsoft are encouraging all users to utilise the new Microsoft Edge browser, which is built on Chromium.

This will mean that customers using the Internet Explorer 11 and Edge (Legacy) browsers will have a degraded experience and/or will be unable to connect to Microsoft 365 apps and services. New Microsoft 365 features will not be available and certain features may stop working. No further security updates will be released either.

Please find dates for end of support below, for ease:

• Internet Explorer 11 for Microsoft Teams from 30 November 2020.
• Internet Explorer 11 for all Microsoft 365 apps and services from 17 August 2021.
• Microsoft Edge (Legacy) browser from 9 March 2021. NB. the latest Microsoft Edge will continue to have full support.

To clarify, these are icons that you will see for Microsoft’s three browsers:

		Internet Explorer — being deprecated in 2020
		Old Edge (Legacy) — being deprecated in 2021
		New Edge (Chromium) ‐ current, use this one

We all share a depth of personal information online which is vulnerable to misuse.

Below we have set out the best ways to protect your personal information on social media, with specifics for Twitter and Linkedin. You can find our previous advice on Facebook here.

In general, with a personal account, you should make sure your friends or followers online are people that you trust. It is recommended to remove any unnecessary personal information, such as birth dates, addresses or location tags. A public account is of course used for more general broadcast, and therefore you should be careful as to exactly what you publish.

It is highly recommended to use two-factor authentication to protect all your online accounts, particularly social media and especially if you are a brand, company or influencer.

Twitter

High profile Twitter accounts were recently exposed as a result of a large cyber exploit which used Twitter’s own internal tools. The below suggestions cannot protect accounts if a social network is compromised as in this case, however they can help you reduce the sensitive information you are giving away or to secure your account more privately.

• Make sure location tagging is off in Settings > Privacy and safety > Location information – to stop revealing your location.
• Under Discoverability and contacts, disable email address and phone number discoverability – this is crucial if you wish to tweet privately or anonymously as people cannot find your account using your other personal information.
• Tick Protect for your tweets on the main Privacy and safety screen – this will allow only people who follow you to see tweets from your account, both past and present. Your tweets also won’t be publicly searchable.
• Untick to Receive messages from anyone in the Direct messages section – to allow only people you follow to send you messages.
• Disable photo tagging – to prevent anyone being able to tag you in photos.
• You can use such third party tools as TweetDelete and Tweepi to unfollow users and delete a large amount of tweets.
• It is also possible to backup your tweets by downloading your Twitter data via your account settings. Also useful if you’d like to cleanse or even close your account.

Linkedin

Linkedin works much like a CV where employees, recruiters, colleagues and followers can view your background, experience and education. Be aware of what information you have shared on Linkedin and who is able to view it.

• It’s recommended to remove any unnecessary email addresses or phone numbers from your Linkedin account. Or at least change them from being publicly visible. Don’t forget that LinkedIn allows others users to search for you using all the contact details associated with your account.
• You can also set information such as your date of birth visible to Only Me using the edit option (pencil icon) on your main profile.
• It is suggested to remove any linked social media accounts and change your geographic location data, to reduce the information that can be linked to you.
• If you’re being actively threatened, LinkedIn recommend to immediately restrict access or set your account to private. Please contact us if you need further support.
• Use LinkedIn’s Privacy Settings to set your profile private and select whether or not people outside your contact network can see your name.

Terms of Service are legal agreements between a service provider and the user of that service. However, Terms of Service tend to be extremely lengthy and too long to read, therefore many of us end up accepting “I have read and agree to the Terms”, without actually knowing what we are agreeing to.

Terms of Service Didn’t Read (TOSDR) is a website that provides a browser add-on via which you can rate and label Terms of Service from class A, “very good” to class E, “very bad”. Please see here to download the specific add-on for your browser.

With TOSDR you can easily see a summary of what terms you are agreeing to. For example, the BBC, CNN and Etsy are rated as class E and state in their terms that “You sign away moral rights”.

It can be seen that other companies also have concerning terms, such as eBay, which states “This service ignores the Do Not Track (DNT) header and tracks users anyway even if they set this header”. Instagram states that “You waive your right to a class action” and Yahoo that “Yahoo! may collect your device fingerprint” (which is a way of tracking users without their permission).

To see the ratings of companies that have already been assessed, please see here.

Facebook is one of the most popular and widely used websites in the world with more than 2 billion active users accessing daily. With this volume of users, a huge amount of personal information is being published and shared.

There are two tools to see which companies or individuals have shared your personal information, which you may not be aware of:

• Off Facebook activity and,
• Businesses who uploaded and used a list.

You can check your Off Facebook activity which allows you to see which apps have shared your information with Facebook about your interactions with them. This includes websites visited or apps used that share information with Facebook so they have “personalised your experience, such as showing relevant ads”.

Lists that businesses have uploaded and used on Facebook are lists which contain personal contact information, e.g. an email address or a phone number. Advertising identifiers can also be included. The information is ‘hashed’ so that Facebook doesn’t learn new identifying information about the holder, but it can be matched against existing users.
Although personal information is not directly shared to Facebook via this method, the ´hashed´ th information can still be matched to personal details and therefore it is known to Facebook, and thereby it is actually shared. This, strictly speaking, is a breach of sharing user data. Personal information is defined by the GDPR as “ any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier”.

In response to this, Facebook states “Facebook uses these lists only to match the information to your profile and to deliver the ads chosen by the advertiser. Facebook does not keep the information shared in these lists”.

The GDPR, on the Lawfulness of data processing, also states that “In order for processing to be lawful, personal data should be processed on the basis of the consent of the data subject concerned or some other legitimate basis…”. The consent to the sharing of data from third party companies to Facebook is not demonstrated, and many users are unaware of the extent of this. The legitimate reasoning behind this is also unclear as “to personalise advertising” does not seem a legitimate or necessary reason.

You can use the below Facebook tools to see who has been sharing your information:

• Off Facebook activity
• Businesses who uploaded and used a list.