Privacy technologies

Privacy technologies

Authorities have responded with severe measures, including a nationwide telecoms blackout and jamming satellite services like Starlink, aimed at preventing coordination among demonstrators. Iranians are embracing freedom tech tools; Bitchat, Noghteha, and Delta Chat for offline communication. Two of these apps trace their origins directly to Bitcoin, highlighting how technologies from this community provide practical solutions in high-stakes environments. Bitchat, built by Bitcoin pioneers Jack Dorsey and open-source developer Calle, operates over Bluetooth mesh networks and the Nostr protocol without needing an internet connection.

Roblox, a gaming app used by nearly half of the entire U.S. population of under-16s, has rolled out a new mandatory safety feature to put a stop to children communicating with adults on the platform. Starting on January 7, players in the U.S. were required to submit to facial age estimation via the app to access the chat feature, although age verification remains optional to play the games themselves.

Over the past five years, annual robocall volume has consistently remained between approximately 50 billion and 55 billion, according to the YouMail Robocall Index. Robocall volume for 2025 totaled 52.5 billion, down a little over 1% from the 2024 total of 52.8 billion. December's 4.1 billion robocalls were up 6.4% from November but down 5.7% from December 2024. YouMail noted that robocalls increased in November and December 2025 after reaching a multi-year low in October.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has rounded up several of these counter surveillance projects, and perhaps unsurprisingly many of these have to do with Flock, best known for its automated license plate reader (ALPR). Flock operates the largest network of surveillance cameras in America, and, while it has contracts with thousands of police departments and municipalities across the US, sometimes ICE gains access to this footage, according to US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and those who have looked into Flock's misuse.

The conservative writer and political strategist Ashley St Clair had just put her young son to bed when she received a text from a friend with a link to a page on X. When she opened it, she says she saw a photo of Grok undressing me and putting me in a bikini'. St Clair was not alone. In recent weeks, countless women have found their images digitally manipulated online by Grok, at the request of X users, to disrobe them.

Our pick for best premium VPN is fast and easy to use. ExpressVPN is back on sale again, and its two-year plans are up to 78 percent off right now. You can get the Advanced tier for $101 for 28 months. This is marked down from the $382 that this time frame normally costs. On a per-month basis, it works out to roughly $3.59 for the promo period.

ICE has been invading U.S. cities, targeting, surveilling , assaulting , and people who are undocumented immigrants. They also have targeted people with work permits , asylum seekers , permanent residents (people holding "green cards"), naturalized citizens , and even citizens by birth. ICE has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on surveillance technology to spy on anyone - and potentially everyone-in the United States.

On smart TVs, ACR can capture hundreds of images of what's on your screen each minute, whether that content originates from the TV's built-in apps or a connected device like a dedicated streaming box or game console. The screenshots are sent to your TV's manufacturer, who can use the data gathered to target ads on your TV, or sell the data to other ad providers to target ads on other platforms.

Turns out anyone with an internet connection, and not even a password, could access the feeds of a line of the Flock surveillance cameras that are currently all the rage with the SFPD and Oakland Police Department. Below we see pictured what is likely one of those Flock Safety automated license plate reader cameras, one of the 400 of these new security cameras in SF that are are taking three million surveillance photos every day.

Their system will get a ping and say, hey, there's a fire within a mile of your property, you should know about it,

If you click 'Technical identifiers Accept all', we and our partners, including 245 who are part of the IAB Transparency & Consent Framework, will also store and/or access information on a device (in other words, use cookies) and use precise geolocation data and other personal data such as Technical identifiers are system-generated strings of letters and numbers that can identify your device or you as a user.

There are many good reasons to keep our identities secret online - and abuse dispensed by a tiny minority is no excuse to override this

California is giving residents a new tool that should make it easier for them to limit data brokers' ability to store and sell their personal information. While state residents have had the right to demand that a company stop collecting and selling their data since 2020, doing so required a laborious process of opting out with each individual company. The Delete Act, passed in 2023, was supposed to simplify things, allowing residents to make a single request that more than 500 registered data brokers delete their information.

Contextual integrity defines privacy as the appropriateness of information flows within specific social contexts, that is, disclosing only the information strictly necessary to carry through a given task, such as booking a medical appointment. According to Microsoft's researchers, today's LLMs lack this kind of contextual awareness and can potentially disclose sensitive information, thereby undermining user trust. The first approach focuses on inference-time checks, i.e., safeguards applied when a model generates its response.

Async Payjoin is the best hope for strong privacy in Bitcoin. Modeled after HTTPS, which enabled secure payments for the web, the Payjoin foundation has been quietly building up this privacy toolkit, which must be adopted by a large number of Bitcoin wallets, to deliver privacy at scale. Modeled after the Bitcoin and Lightning dev kits - which have become quite popular among wallet developers - and built with the same cryptographic primitives already in Bitcoin core, such that it can be easily integrated into the main Bitcoin implementation,

A DFR program features a fleet of camera-equipped drones, which can range from just a couple to dozens or more. These are deployed from a launch pad in response to 911 calls and other calls for service, sometimes operated by a drone pilot or, increasingly, autonomously directed to the call location. The appeal is the promise of increased "situational awareness" for officers headed to a call.

In 2025, elected officials across the country began treating surveillance technology purchases differently: not as inevitable administrative procurements handled by police departments, but as political decisions subject to council oversight and constituent pressure. This shift proved to be the most effective anti-surveillance strategy of the year. Since February, at least 23 jurisdictions fully ended, cancelled, or rejected Flock Safety ALPR programs (including , , , Hays County , , Eugene, Springfield , and ) by recognizing surveillance procurement as political power, not administrative routine.

Across ideologically diverse communities, 2025 campaigns against automated license plate reader (ALPR) surveillance kept winning. From Austin, Texas to Cambridge, Massachusetts to Eugene, Oregon, successful campaigns combined three practical elements: a motivated political champion on city council, organized grassroots pressure from affected communities, and technical assistance at critical decision moments. The 2025 Formula for Refusal Institutional Authority: Council members leveraging "procurement power"-local democracy's most underutilized tool-to say no.

It's no longer surprising when the shoes you've been eyeing pop up on your feed multiple times a day, or when the resort you casually mentioned to your partner appears on their socials. At this point, even your nephew's Christmas wishlist somehow finds its way into your ads. Yes, online advertising has become persistent - and honestly a little unnerving - but it doesn't have to be. AdGuard blocks ads, trackers, malware risks, and more at the network level,

It seems like everywhere we turn we see dystopian stories about technology's impact on our lives and our futures-from tracking-based surveillance capitalism, to street level government surveillance, to the dominance of a few large platforms choking innovation, to the growing efforts by authoritarian governments to control what we see and say-the landscape can feel bleak. Exposing and articulating these problems is important, but so is envisioning and then building solutions. That's where our podcast comes in.

This community wants... whatever we can do to make our schools safer,