In 2001, a smugglers’ yacht washed up in the Azores and disgorged its contents. The island of São Miguel was quickly flooded with high-grade cocaine – and nearly 20 years on, it is still feeling the effects.

By Matthew Bremner

Around midday on 6 June 2001, locals from Pilar da Bretanha, a parish on the northwestern tip of the Atlantic island São Miguel, saw a white yacht, about 40 feet long, drifting aimlessly near the area’s sheer cliffs. None of the villagers had ever seen a boat of this size floating so close to that part of the coast, where the sea was shallow, the tides strong and the rocks razor-sharp. They supposed it was an amateur sailor who had got lost.

In fact, the man sailing the boat was a skilled seaman. Two Italian passports, a Spanish passport and a Spanish national ID card were later found in his possession, all of which showed the same 44-year-old with weathered skin and dark curly hair. But each of the four documents listed a different name. In the previous three months, he had crossed the Atlantic twice, sailing more than 3,000 miles from the Canary Islands, just west of Morocco, to north-east Venezuela, and then back again, to São Miguel, 1,000 miles west of Portugal.

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Krystalo writes: The last day of Google's developer conference tends not to have any news, but this year was a little overloaded. Google announced today that it's working on bringing Electronic IDs to Android. Separately, the company also confirmed that all new Android Q devices will be required to encrypt user data. Replacing ID cards, such as driver's licenses and club memberships, has been the last major piece of the digital wallet puzzle. We're not talking about securely logging into web pages -- this is for identifying yourself in "physical world transactions." Wallet apps can replace plane tickets, loyalty cards, and credit cards, but they still can't pass for valid ID. Google is looking to add Electronic ID support so developers can build mobile apps that can be securely used as an ID.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Businesses should be prepared for privacy lawsuits from employees and customers whose biometric data they store

Every company has security issues and it’s clear that just using passwords, ID cards and personal identification numbers don’t go far enough to solve the problem of hacks, breaches and intrusions. That’s why experts are pushing biometrics – fingerprints or retina and face scans – as the best way for a company to secure access to their facilities and their data. But some companies are finding that there’s a big risk to relying on biometrics; the risk of getting sued by your own employees.

Security is one thing. But privacy is another. Many people think there’s a line between the two that shouldn’t be crossed. That was the main point behind a recent Illinois supreme court ruling that upheld an employee’s right to know what was being done with the biometric information that was collected from its employees.

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