Privacy technologies

Privacy technologies

The American dream is "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" but, in practice, it has always been about ownership. Sadly, the dream of ownership is slowly slipping away for many people. Harvard University's 2025 Youth Poll found that three-quarters say they want to own a home, but barely half think they ever will. Ownership feels increasingly out of reach.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-9242 (CVSS score: 9.3), is described as an out-of-bounds write vulnerability affecting Fireware OS 11.10.2 up to and including 11.12.4_Update1, 12.0 up to and including 12.11.3 and 2025.1. "An out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the WatchGuard Fireware OS iked process may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code," WatchGuard said in an advisory released last month. "This vulnerability affects both the mobile user VPN with IKEv2 and the branch office VPN using IKEv2 when configured with a dynamic gateway peer."

Google is adding new ways to recover Google accounts without losing any information in case you lose your device or if your account is compromised through a hack. The company is adding a new feature called Recovery Contacts, which lets you add your trusted friends or family members as contacts to initiate your recovery and verify your identity. When you are locked out of your account because you lost your device or forgot your password.

The idea is that by exposing some of these details, users will be able to make a more informed decision about whether someone is operating an authentic account or if they're possibly a bot or bad actor attempting to sow misinformation. For instance, if an account's bio claims they're based in a U.S. state, but their account information shows it's based overseas, you may suspect the account has another agenda.

In May of this year, 404 Media published evidence that Illinois automated license plate reader data was being accessed on behalf of federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as directly by law enforcement agencies across the country, including in Texas, who used the information for immigration enforcement and to monitor people seeking abortions.

You've built a lending process that works. Your team is efficient, your systems are dialed in and you've invested in technology to stay competitive. But if you still rely on credit reports, static databases or third-party records that borrowers didn't explicitly authorize, you're not as modern as you think. Consumer expectations have shifted. In a world where privacy and transparency matter, outdated data practices are more than just annoying; they're trust killers.

Smart glasses, like the newly revealed Meta Ray-Ban Displays, solve lots of problems. They can provide live translation and captions while chatting with a foreign friend, they can use provide turn-by-turn directions and a mini map so you don't get lost on the way to that new coffeeshop, they can take pictures so you're not fumbling with your phone while enjoying a sunset or nature walk.

What does my baby look like at six weeks? When's my due date? When should I book my first midwife appointment? These are just some questions women type into search engines when they find out they're pregnant. For Sammi Claxon, it was no different. Soon after she started searching for answers, algorithms picked up that she was pregnant, and began targeting her with adverts. But when she lost her baby due to a miscarriage, the adverts didn't stop.

Did you know that whenever you turn on your smart TV, you invite an unseen guest to watch it with you? These days, most mainstream TVs use automatic content recognition (ACR), a type of ad-tracking technology that collects data on everything you watch and sends it to a central database. Manufacturers then use this information to understand your viewing habits and deliver highly targeted ads.

Who controls the data? Every meeting should be captured, but not every recording needs to be shared. Use private meeting settings, control access permissions, and set retention policies that auto-delete after a certain number of days. Who needs access? The power of AI is capturing everything. The responsibility is controlling who sees what. Share broadly for team updates, narrowly for performance reviews, not at all for sensitive discussions.

Four years ago, in a building in the former industrial heart of Prague, Eric Sirion sat at his computer with freshly written code and a simple mission: buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin. The place was Paralelní Polis, during the annual Hackers Congress - a fitting venue for an experiment in digital freedom. This was not the first time Bitcoin had been used to buy coffee, but this time was different.

Meet Rewarded Interest, a company launched last year by Scott Spencer and Thede Loder. Spencer was a long-time Google ad tech product leader who joined with the DoubleClick acquisition and Loder was most recently an engineering leader at Microsoft via the acquisition of RiskIQ. Spencer and Loder are attempting an idea that has been tested many times, but never brought to life successfully - although there's a new twist this time. Rewarded Interest has a Chrome browser extension that promises users a cut of the revenue they generate from online tracking data.

It's been almost 10 years since Brave launched, and slowly but surely the privacy-focused web browser is attracting more and more users. It's been a long road with some ups and downs, but it's paying off. According to a recent company blog post, Brave says its browser has crossed a new milestone: 100 million active monthly users. That's as of September 2025, representing a huge jump up from the 50 million users milestone it reached back in 2021. That's a four-year doubling!

Transparency is one of the foundational features of blockchains, but it enabled value extraction by controlling the order and inclusion of transactions within a block, known as MEV, or maximal extractable value. This problem is common on most blockchains and is rooted in the public nature of mempools, a ledger that stores pending transactions data. This information allowed block producers and other actors to benefit from frontrunning transactions.

Caroline Wilson Palow, legal director of the campaign group Privacy International, said the new order might be "just as big a threat to worldwide security and privacy" as the old one. She said: "If Apple breaks end-to-end encryption for the UK, it breaks it for everyone. The resulting vulnerability can be exploited by hostile states, criminals, and other bad actors the world over."

If true, this new order is not 'less worse' than the first. That's because, as we have been saying all along, Apple cannot undermine end-to-end encryption of iCloud services only for the UK when those services are used worldwide. If Apple breaks end-to-end encryption for the UK, it breaks it for everyone. The resulting vulnerability can be exploited by hostile states, criminals and other bad actors the world over.

The UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a 'back door' that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties,