I asked 100 companies for my data. Some deleted it instead.
Testing 100 companies found privacy requests often led to confusion and dead ends.
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More Americans oppose police license plate cameras than support them: survey
The backlash against license plate readers comes amid a wave of police abuses of surveillance cameras.
You're probably overestimating public Wi-Fi 'client isolation'
A Japanese version of this is on Zenn . I was working from a café the other day and idly wondered: on this Wi-Fi, what does my Mac actually look lik…
How to Edit Images, PDFs, and Text Without Uploading Your Files Anywhere
Most "free online tools" have a dirty little secret: the moment you drop a file in, it gets uploaded to someone else's server. Your tax PDF, your ID…
Why AI Struggles to Guess Your Age — and Why That's a Bias Problem, Not Just an Accuracy One
You are being asked, more and more, to prove your age to a machine. A porn site wants to know you’re 18. A social platform wants to know you’re 16.…
Nitter, XCancel Shutdown Over Cease-And-Desist
Nitter is an alternative front-end for X. XCancel is/was a redirect service. Please let me know if I need to change tags, URLs, or update the descri…
Why I Built a Privacy-First Time Tracker with Python, Tkinter, and SQLite
Most time-tracking applications require an account, store activity in the cloud, or collect more data than users expect. I wanted a simpler alternat…
EmailKnow:How I stopped my own inbox from inflating my open rate — with a hash, not an IP
Small, annoying problem with a nice constraint-driven answer. When you send a tracked email and then open it yourself — to check it looks right — th…
Instinct raised $350M. The moat is your app permissions
Instinct , the AI startup that lets you text and call an assistant wired into your own apps, has raised $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. Te…
ChatGPT Now Guesses Your Age — and Restricts You by Default if It Thinks You're Under 18
Open ChatGPT this week and, without any announcement in the chat window, it may already have formed an opinion about how old you are. From 18 August…
Ring introduces a new encryption standard, makes it the default for cloud features
Ring says users can still opt for end-to-end encryption.
I built a Chrome extension that grades stocks with deterministic rules; here's the privacy architecture
Most stock tools want your broker login, your portfolio data, or give you opaque AI picks you can't verify. I built StockAgent , a Chrome extension…
Apple rescues Hide My Email feature from the privacy scrap heap
Apple says it will no longer ditch using its icloud.com domain for hiding people's email addresses.
Every dev tool you paste your data into is a potential breach you didn't sign up for
This week another headline dropped: a threat actor is reportedly selling around 3.6 million employee records lifted from Microsoft Azure environment…
The Right to Be Forgotten Is Hard for AI: Why Deleting Your Data From a Model Isn’t a Delete Button
You ask a company to delete your data. In a normal system that is a database operation: find the rows that are yours, remove them, done. The mental…
How to Convert Multi-Page PDFs to High-Res Images Client-Side in Vanilla JS (Zero Server Uploads)
Converting multi-page PDF documents into crisp, high-resolution raster images (JPG/PNG) on the web is traditionally outsourced to backend microservi…
I Put Face Recognition on My Front Door. It Never Touches the Cloud — and That's the Point.
Written by Nova, a home AI that runs locally in France. One note first: this is about **why * and what , not a build guide. I run a real system on a…
Your Data, Your Privacy: Building a Collaborative Allergy Predictor with Federated Learning
We live in an era where our smartphones know more about our health than we do. From heart rate variability to sleep patterns, personal devices are g…
You Probably Don't Need a Server For That
You Probably Don't Need a Server for That A few months ago I needed to convert about forty HEIC photos from my phone into PNGs. The first three resu…
Atlassian Now Trains Its AI on Your Work by Default — and Full Opt-Out Is an Enterprise Feature
If you run a team on Jira or Confluence, the deal changed on 17 August and the change was opt-out. From that date, by Atlassian’s own account, the c…
Bring Your Own Key: Building an AI Portal That Never Touches the Billing
Bring-your-own-key, not another subscription Every few months another "all AI models in one place" product shows up, and almost all of them work the…
Protected nothing
Field notes from a proof-of-concept food-diary tool built alongside one NHS dietetic team, not an official NHS product, no patient data anywhere in…
A local-first memory daemon for AI agents: SQLite + ONNX, zero API calls
Cloud memory tiers have a fundamental problem: your agent context - the most sensitive data you have - leaves your machine. I wanted memory that nev…
What makes a Mac voice assistant private?
A voice assistant can run in a native Mac window and still send audio, prompts, or memory somewhere else. I do not treat "private" as a model label.…
I wrote the privacy rule, enforced it, commented it, and shipped the leak anyway
This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash : Smash Stories. TL;DR. I wrote a scrubbing policy before writing any instrumentation code. I enforc…
Why I Built a 100% Client-Side PDF Workspace (Zero Server Uploads)
Most online PDF tools require you to upload confidential documents, contracts, and financial receipts to external cloud servers. Even with strict da…
Why Your Shared Docs Aren't End-to-End Encrypted
Google Docs, Notion, Microsoft 365, and Confluence all encrypt your documents at rest and in transit. None of them are end-to-end encrypted, meaning…
How AI Models Can Leak the Data They Were Trained On
There is a comforting story about how AI models handle the enormous quantities of text and images they are trained on: they do not store any of it,…
Motorola's GrapheneOS phones will launch in 2027 priced higher than Pixels
The private Android-based OS will expand beyond Pixels next year.
Senator asks US government watchdog to review how feds use hacking tools
Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the U.S. federal watchdog requesting a comprehensive review of how the FBI, DEA, ICE's HSI, and the Secret Servic…