Press

Researchers from the International Computer Science Institute found up to 1,325 Android apps that were gathering data from devices even after people explicitly denied them permission. Serge Egelman, director of usable security and privacy research at the ICSI, presented the study in late June at the Federal Trade Commission's PrivacyCon.

Still, Facebook is sure to face an onslaught of liability concerns when it comes to anti-money laundering and identity verification, said Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute.

Nefeli, launched in 2017 with a $10 million series A funding round, is co-founded by company chairman Scott Shenker, who was previously the initial CEO of Nicira, an early software-defined networking company that sold to VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012. Another co-founder is CTO Sylvia Ratnasamy, an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where her work focuses on the design and implementation of networked systems.

To satisfy the demands of law enforcement, telecommunications networks are typically built to enable some type of wiretapping function. Such abilities have in the past been subverted by intelligence agencies to snoop on calls and scoop up data, so using Chinese-designed equipment for such networks practically represents an invitation to Beijing to spy, “since the infrastructure itself is designed to support such meddling,” argued Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute.