Privacy technologies

Privacy technologies

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.

On Saturday, a man killed two Brown University students, injuring nine others, before traveling to Brookline on Monday to fatally kill an MIT professor. On Thursday, law enforcement officials found him dead in a storage facility in New Hampshire. Since then, AP reported that police said information from a tipster who had a strange encounter with the man outside Brown University was key to their finding the suspect.

Contact import has always been the most effective way to find people you know on a social app, but it's also been poorly implemented or abused by platforms. Even with encryption, phone numbers have been leaked or brute-forced, sold to spammers, or used by platforms for dubious purposes. We weren't willing to accept that risk, so we developed a fundamentally more secure approach that protects your data.

The city will stick with a surveillance company that scans license plates to help law enforcement catch criminal suspects, a dramatic reversal of an earlier vote that had rejected the firm's new $2 million contract. The company, Flock Safety, will maintain an existing network of 300 cameras to monitor the city's busiest streets and local state highways for up to two years while the Oakland Police Department conducts a competitive search for a long-term vendor.

Age Range for Apps shares your age range with apps to help keep experiences age-appropriate. If you are 13 or older, you can set this feature up yourself. If you are under a Family Sharing group, a parent or guardian will need to help manage your age range and related controls in Family Sharing settings. app age rating system, which it updated in February in order to provide more granular categorization for apps, especially among teen audiences .

Behold: Ken Paxton will now demonstrate that broken clocks are indeed right twice a day. The Texas Attorney General is notorious for, well, a very long list of reasons. But in this case, he at least appears to be doing consumers a solid: He sued five television companies for using ad-targeting spyware on their TVs. Texas sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense and TCL for allegedly recording what viewers watch without their consent.