Tag: privacy

Flock (Again!) Activates A Camera System A Town Had Voted To Shut Down

The easiest way to tell that Flock Safety doesn't really care that its massive network of ALPR (automatic license plate reader) cameras is being abused by cops to stalk their exes and harass residents is to judge it by its actions. When confronted with court case after court case detailing these allegations (and those are...

Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases Of Their Patrons?

Recent reports have raised alarm about the use of PatronScan, an ID-checking and face-scanning system, at multiple LGBTQ+ bars in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. Much of the attention has focused on reports that the system photographs patrons as they enter venues and questions about whether those images are used for facial recognition. A broader privacy...

The Password Database Is Dead, We just haven't buried it yet.

Modern Digital Identity relies on storing millions of credentials in a central server databases, creating high-value targets for breaches. By shifting the authentication to device-native hardware and ZKPs, we can eliminate database leaks risks entirely.

Notes for August 4, 2026

Just use the website, Jonah Hill probably has truck nuts on his vehicle, spelunking on the moon, average individual intelligence, and a sick new voxel-based Pokémon red/blue/yellow hack

The SCREEN Act Threatens Privacy Far Beyond Adult Websites

The Senate Commerce Committee is set to consider S. 737, the SCREEN Act, a sweeping age-verification bill that would require online services to verify users’ ages before they can access any sexually explicit content. If this bill passes, it will force millions of adult internet users to give up their anonymity, privacy, and security before...

404 Media Scores Leaked Document Detailing The Dozens Of Surveillance Tools ICE Has Access To

The always-invaluable 404 Media has scored another minor coup. We all know ICE is heavily invested in surveillance tech, ranging from its purchases of cell location data from data brokers to throwing money at Clearview AI, the most notorious of facial recognition tech firms. But there's so much more to it than that. On top...

Public and Private Knowledge

Why publishing a knowledge base requires synthesis and declassification rather than exposing a private graph.

Why does protecting your privacy require a computer science degree?

From vintage Instagram filters to owning your digital footprint. Reclaiming your social media shouldn't be an engineering challenge.

A Full Guide to Properly Delete Corporate Social Media Accounts

Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, X, Reddit, Discord. Eight platforms, eight different deletion policies. A full technical walkthrough of what 'delete' actually means on each one, the prep work nobody tells you to do first, and the human-side work the documentation doesn't mention.

REVIEW: Missing 'Missing Richard Simmons'

Nearly a decade after Dan Taberski's Missing Richard Simmons first asked the world where its brightest fitness star had gone, a review of the podcast that helped invent true-crime infotainment—and of the public's complicity in turning a man's right to disappear into a cultural obsession. On parasocial friendship, the ethics of documentary mystery, and why the legacy of Richard Simmons has been swallowed by the very mystery he refused to solve.

Get FISA Right turns 18

Thanks to everybody who's been involved over the years!

Strangers and Intimates

The fascinating story of how private life was won, and how it might just as easily be lost... Private life is in mortal danger, following decades in which it has been relinquished and ransacked. It is threatened by a three-headed state and corporate surveillance, a confessional, 'tell-all' culture that makes people complicit in the invasion of their own privacy, and the intense politicization of private life. Tiffany Jenkins's groundbreaking book traces the emergence of private sanctuaries from authority and public opinion to show that private life is a very recent – and hard-won – achievement. It also warns that, if we're not careful, it will be a temporary one. Strangers and Intimates is animated by dramatic human from the political struggles in the seventeenth century that led to Edmund Coke's rallying cry that 'an Englishman's home is his castle'; to the first modern privacy panic in 1844, when the British government opened private letters sent to the exiled Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini; and from the embrace by the public of reality TV to the Chinese government's social credit system. A private life is a precious, sustaining resource that is of profound intrinsic value, and it must be defended. We won't know what we have lost until it has gone...

CookieCrumble im App Store

Berlin, Juni 2026 CookieCrumble für Safari – die erste App für iOS, die Cookies gezielt löscht Für den Mac gibt es seit Jahren leistungsfähige Tools zur Verwaltung von Cookies. Auf dem iPhone sieht…

CookieCrumble Testflight jetzt auch für macOS

Eigentlich war ich mit Cookie.app bisher ganz zufrieden. Bis ich vor Kurzem festgestellt habe, dass die App den Großteil der Safari-Cookies weder anzeigt noch löschen kann. Von den 254 Domains, die…

What next on FISA Section 702? Good question!

Once things do pick up, they're likely to start moving quickly. So ... stay tuned!

on your side, all the way down

you'll never see most of what we do to keep your solstone life journal yours. so here it is, one layer at a time — the work of making sure nothing about you ever leaks out to anyone, and how you can check that we mean it.

Choosing Friction and Clear Skies: I’m No Longer Using Cloudflare

I'm pausing my folk.zone project to completely replace Cloudflare in my stack with more ethical choices after a conversation with Adam Newbold of omg.lol, the site that inspired the project in the first place. For in practice, there is no such thing as neutrality, and convenience is not a virtue.

W Social is TruthSocial with a European accent.

Different politics, identical structure: wealthy insiders, community infrastructure they didn't build, and openness performed just long enough to matter. The establishment always wants its own internet.

Why We Need Devices for Children

All-out social media bans are harmful for kids and adults, but there's a more effective, privacy-respecting option...

Make your Gmail more private

Proton, the Swiss encrypted and privacy-aware email service, now lets you read and reply to your Gmail emails from within Proton. If you're looking to wean yourself off Gmail, or just curious about trying an alternative, this could be a good place to start: anyone you reply to will still receive your messages as Gmail,...

The Comprehension Problem: A Proposal for Synthesis Disclosure on ATProto

On May 23, @dame.is pointed a Claude agent at their own Bluesky account. In minutes, it paginated through ~2,000 posts and produced a detailed political profile — organized by topic, with representative quotes, noting that explicit politics was "a steady minor stream, not the main event."

The Cost of Comprehension

On May 23, @dame.is demonstrated something simple: a Claude agent, connected to Bluesky via bsky.md, paginated through approximately 2,000 of their posts and built a categorized political profile in minutes. Topics, representative quotes, behavioral patterns—all synthesized into a readable dossier.

Owning My Corner of the Internet: Self-Hosting Decentralized Social Media

When do we get a Privacy-Preserving CDN?

The surveillance-capitalism business model that defines the Internet today is only going to get more imposing. The vast majority of our online requests today are serviced and logged by centralized infrastructure - even more centralized than what we probably expect. While our collective hivemind takes rightful pride in the successful pushes that have improved this...

Social Sync v0.5.0 — Identity & Consent

Rebranding to Social Sync, implementing a granular consent system, and moving to AT Protocol OAuth.

The Internet's Landlord Problem

A quarter of the entire Internet uses Cloudflare. This is an existential threat to the Internet's ideals. I realized I need DDoS protection, but I could not use Cloudflare in good conscience. And so, I'm beyond excited to announce that I'm now using Deflect.ca for my website.

"But it's just Bluesky..."

We hear you. Here's what we've done about it, and what's coming next.

Boops: the story so far...

A small feature with a surprisingly complicated launch.

Publishing Without the Platform: What Leaflet.pub Does Differently Than Substack

Leaflet.pub builds on the AT Protocol to give you something Substack never will: content you actually own. Here's what that means for European marketers.

How an Instagram page became an app

A decade of building community, the principles that shaped it, and the platform that grew from it.

The 7 best HIPAA-compliant analytics tools

Compare the best HIPAA-compliant analytics tools, including PostHog, Mixpanel, Amplitude, and more. See which tools offer BAAs and self-hosting options.

California's Age Assurance Lacuna

California's Digital Age Assurance Act presents new headaches and concerns for operating system maintainers and app developers. But is it the catastrophe some claim?

Fighting back against techno-capitalist-authoritarianism

Lately I feel like the world's slow burn has been set to broil. Things are not good. And often times, I feel kind of hopeless, like we are going to have no choice but to succumb to authoritarianism and our new tech overlords. Sometimes it feels utterly impossible to do anything to shift the tide of doom. And that's the point. The people in control want us to feel hopeless, they want us to feel a sense of existential nihilism so that we don't fight back because we think it's useless to do so. Com...

hello, network!

introducing habitat.

Agents Don't Have Pockets

When we talk about trust between humans online, we lean heavily on the privacy model. E2E encryption. Secret keys. The assumption that two parties can create a channel no one else can access.

Microsoft is out!

Overstappen naar Europese tech

The 9 best GDPR-compliant analytics tools

Compare the best GDPR-compliant analytics tools with EU hosting, self-hosting, and cookieless tracking – including PostHog, Plausible, Matomo, and Fathom.

BigTech independence update: cleaning house for local AI

Three months after my original BigTech independence article, here's what changed and why I'm building infrastructure for local AI.

App selection criteria

The last app I bought through Apple's app store was a client for my Audiobookshelf instance and this reminded me why I'd built a Navidrome client . I wanted to use the web application as a PWA, but Apple doesn't support continuous audio playback in PWAs or Safari on iOS. Audio plays, but it never advances to the next track.