Privacy

How people talk about data privacy can overcome – or reinforce – their skepticism that things can change.

GitLab Enterprise Edition

Yassine Zouggari or zoug’s blog on computer science and loosely related subjects, in French and English.

An engineer discovered that the manufacturer can remotely brick his smart vacuum for not collecting data.

They have a hidden app with every permission enabled already and you can’t change that.

AB-1043 “Age verification signals: software applications and online services.”

Google Cartographer huh…

Based on the article: Facebook has recently gotten an Ex-Meta Member into the Data Protection Agency of Ireland near end of 2024. They were sued for 250 million euro. They are back now actively trying to push for lower data protections in the EU publicly saying “It will hurt Meta”

A constantly updated dark web monitoring tool.

Privacy-focused browser receives major updates while ending support for legacy platforms.

Someone recently managed to get on a Microsoft Teams call with representatives from phone hacking company Cellebrite, and then leaked a screenshot of the company’s capabilities against many Google Pixel phones, according to a forum post about the leak and 404 Media’s review of the material.

Differential privacy keeps that data private. It’s a mathematical framework whereby a statistical output can’t be used to determine any individual’s data in a dataset, and the bureau’s algorithm for differential privacy is called TopDown. It injects “noise” into the data starting at the highest level (national), moving progressively downward. There are certain constraints placed around the kind of noise that can be introduced—for instance, the total number of people in a state or census block has to remain the same. But other demographic characteristics, like race or gender, are randomly reassigned to individual records within a set tranche of data. This way, the overall number of people with a certain characteristic remains constant, while the characteristics associated with any one record don’t describe an individual person. In other words, you’ll know how many women or Hispanic people are in a census block, just not exactly where.

Source: https://chaos.social/@delta/115454041149791990

It’s really sad to see SimpleX goes the shitcoin route to try and fund their project, Ethereum is not ethical as I briefly explained in this post

From confidential contracts, communications, and employee records, unencrypted emails put your business at risk. Here’s why companies must ensure emails are end-to-end encrypted by default.

A very, very helpful article to help get people we fight with to understand why this is important for anyone and everyone. Send this to friends and family.

Meta AI is here to stay, but you can control what it learns about you. Find out why and how to turn off AI on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp.

Good if you need to use Chrome stuff

In this post, I hope to clarify and expand on some of the points and rebut some of the counter-messaging that we have witnessed.

Deep dive on why Meta need to be totally boycotted.

A software architect discovered his iLife A11 smart vacuum was secretly transmitting data to overseas servers in 2025. When he blocked the data collection, the vacuum was remotely disabled through hidden software that allowed manufacturer access[^1].

If you thought living in Europe, Canada, or Hong Kong meant you were protected from having LinkedIn scrape your posts to train its AI, think again. You have a week to opt out before the Microsoft subsidiary assumes you’re fine with it.

Specifically, Teams will detect if the user has connected to the company’s own Wi-Fi and automatically set the work location accordingly to the respective building.

The system won’t be available until January 1, 2026 and the data brokers won’t start processing the requests until August 1, but still a nice step.

Specifically, Teams will detect if the user has connected to the company’s own Wi-Fi and automatically set the work location accordingly to the respective building.

The U.S. will expand the use of facial recognition technology to track non-citizens entering and leaving the country in order to combat visa overstays and passport fraud, according to a government document published on Friday.

How to protect your privacy on your smartphone Today, our smartphones follow us everywhere - from the workplace to our most private moments. But many people don’t realize that smartphones collect significant amounts of personal data in the background. In the this article, we share useful privacy tips how to…

Both Google and Apple are cramming new AI features into their phones and other devices, and neither company has offered clear ways to control which apps those AI systems can access. Recent issues around WhatsApp on both Android and iPhone demonstrate how these interactions can go sideways, risking revealing chat conversations beyond what you intend. Users deserve better

You can’t say they aren’t innovating.

Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses usually include an LED that lights up when the user is recording other people. One hobbyist is charging a small fee to disable that light, and has a growing list of customers around the country.

In an open letter to the Irish government on Thursday (23 October), signed by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, noyb, ARTICLE 19, the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, plus 40 others, highlights the conflict of interest Sweeney brings to a position that is supposed to police the same firms in which she used to work.

Changes to TikTok’s policies make it easier for the company to share users’ personal information with governments. TikTok did not respond to questions about the changes.

Concerns over AI surveillance in schools are intensifying after armed officers swarmed a 16-year-old student outside Kenwood High School in Baltimore when an AI gun detection system falsely flagged a Doritos bag as a firearm.

The DNS0.EU non-profit public DNS service focused on European users announced its immediate shut down due to time and resource constraints.