标签：#Privacy

The New York Times has a long article ( alt link ) on surveillance systems aimed at babies. They are increasingly using AI. Nanit and its rivals want to own 24/7 health tracking for the sub-four-foot set. And their already astonishing levels of baby data collection are just the beginning. Nanit recently raised $50 million from investors to expand its use of A.I. and use its camera to track speech and language development, motor skills and more, while extending its presence in children’s bedrooms into early adolescence.

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 model of “delete” that privacy law is built on — the GDPR’s right to erasure, most obviously — assumes exactly this: that your data sits somewhere as a discrete record you can locate and destroy. A trained AI model breaks that assumption. Answer first: your data isn’t stored in the model as a record at all. It is dissolved into the model’s parameters — billions of numbers, each nudged a little during training by every example it saw, yours included. There is no row labelled with your name to delete. Removing your influence means changing the numbers, and doing that cleanly is a genuine research problem, not a setting with a toggle. Where your data actually goes when a model “learns” it Training a large model is a process of adjustment. The model makes a prediction, it’s wrong, and an optimiser tweaks its parameters a fraction to make that particular kind of error slightly less likely next time. Repeat across trillions of tokens and those fractional tweaks accumulate into a system that has, in a distributed and lossy way, absorbed patterns from its training data. The key word is distributed . A single document doesn’t live in one identifiable place in the weights; its contribution is smeared across many parameters that also encode a great many other things. Two consequences follow, and they are the whole reason this is hard. First, you cannot point at the part of the model that is “you.” Second, deleting the original document from the training set does nothing to the model that already trained on it — the lesson has been learned and the textbook has been closed. The data is gone; the influence remains. Erasing your data from the training set is like removing a single lump of sugar from a cake that has already been baked. The lump is gone from the recipe. The sweetness is still in the cake. The clean fix that nobody can af

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 content your team writes into its Cloud products — Confluence pages, Jira tickets, the descriptions and comments where the actual work lives — is used by default to train Rovo, Atlassian’s AI assistant. You were not asked to opt in. You were, at best, given a switch and left to find it. Answer first, because the detail matters more than the outrage: there are two settings, and they are not equal. One governs your in-app data — the text itself. The other governs metadata — the derived signals about that text. On the Free, Standard and Premium plans you can turn off the content, but the metadata switch is greyed out; Atlassian’s support page reads, flatly, “You can’t change this setting.” The full off switch, the one that also stops metadata contribution, is available only on Enterprise. Privacy, in other words, is now a plan tier. What actually changed, with the switches named Atlassian’s data-contribution documentation lays out a matrix that is worth reading slowly, because the defaults are doing the heavy lifting. In-app data contribution defaults to on for Free and Standard customers and off for Premium and Enterprise. Every tier can toggle that one. Metadata contribution is a different story: it is on across the board and can only be switched off by Enterprise. So the customer contributing the most by default — content and metadata, both on, no ability to fully stop it — is the one on the cheapest plan who never opened the settings page. The categories are broad. In-app data, per Atlassian’s materials, covers Confluence page titles and body text, Jira work-item titles, descriptions and comments, and custom status and workflow names. Metadata covers the derived layer: readability scores, task classifications (that a ticket is “sales work,” say), story points, sprint end dates, SLA values, and semantic-similarity measure

Envelope encryption con clave por usuario, qué se cifra y qué no, cómo lo puso a prueba una auditoría externa, y el incidente de rendimiento que provocó nuestro propio hardening de seguridad. Montaste tu app con IA rápido: le pides unos datos al usuario, llamas al modelo, guardas el resultado en la base de datos y a producción. Cómodo, sin complicaciones. Hasta que un día miras bien qué estás guardando. En Cuentopia generamos cuentos personalizados para niños. Para personalizar, un padre nos cuenta cómo es su peque: su carácter, qué le da miedo, qué está pasando en casa. El modelo no improvisa sobre la marcha: se apoya en un marco de criterios clínicos y pedagógicos para decidir cómo abordar cada situación, y luego lo reescribe todo en prosa. Visto de golpe, lo que teníamos en la base de datos era el diario emocional de un montón de menores. El RGPD lo trata como categoría especialmente protegida. El sentido común, también. ¿Y si se filtra la base de datos? ¿Y un backup mal guardado? ¿Y un acceso indebido con privilegios de admin? Relájate —bueno, primero asústate un poco; luego relájate—. Te voy a contar cómo pensamos el cifrado en reposo en serio: una arquitectura de tipo envelope encryption , con una clave maestra que no sale nunca de Cloud KMS (Google Cloud) y una clave por usuario que cifra los campos sensibles antes de que toquen la base de datos. Un aviso antes de seguir: te cuento el criterio y las decisiones, no el plano. No vas a encontrar aquí nombres de recursos, rutas de repositorio, ni el detalle exacto que le serviría de receta a alguien con ganas de probar suerte con nuestros datos. Y porque la seguridad honesta se cuenta entera, también te cuento dónde decidimos no llegar y por qué. ✨ Promesa: al terminar vas a entender, con criterio real de producto, cómo una familia sin ser expertos en cripto se planteó cifrar datos de menores — y por qué ciertas decisiones muy concretas no se hacen públicas nunca, ni en el artículo más honesto. El mapa Lo constru

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 enforced it in a beforeSend hook. I unit tested it. I wrote a comment above the one obviously sensitive line saying exactly what it must never do. Then I intercepted the actual bytes leaving the browser and found a stranger's shoulder injury in them. Every guarantee I had written was about data my code hands to the SDK. None of them were about data the SDK collects on its own. The setup WhyRep is a workout tracker built local-first. Training data is created and read on the device, the tracker works offline with no account, and that is not a marketing line, it is the architecture. It is also the thing people decide to trust or not trust in about four seconds on the landing page. So when I added Sentry, the scrubbing policy came before the code. Written down, in the repo, as a list of things that may never appear in an event: exercise names, weights, reps, RIR, session notes, chat content. Never. On Android I enforced it twice. A beforeSend hook that strips the forbidden fields, and a unit test that constructs an event carrying each one and asserts it comes out stripped. @Test fun `beforeSend strips every field the policy forbids` () { val event = SentryEvent (). apply { setExtra ( "exerciseName" , "Incline Barbell Bench" ) setExtra ( "weightKg" , 82.5 ) setExtra ( "notes" , "left shoulder clicks past parallel" ) } val scrubbed = ScrubbingPolicy . scrub ( event , Hint ()) assertNull ( scrubbed ?. getExtra ( "exerciseName" )) assertNull ( scrubbed ?. getExtra ( "weightKg" )) assertNull ( scrubbed ?. getExtra ( "notes" )) } Green. Good. Then I wired up the landing site's share-link page. It decodes whyrep.com/t#<payload> , where the payload is somebody's entire workout template, base64 in the URL fragment. I was careful there too. On a decode failure it reports a coarse reason tag and never the payload: // NEVER send the payload i

Some fortnights the gripes scatter; this one they converged. Across the forums where paying customers of the big AI tools compare notes, the same complaint surfaced against three different companies in the same window: the monthly plan buys less than it did, and nobody dropped the price to match. One firm’s temporary generosity is about to expire, another’s year-old plan has quietly tightened, and the users caught in the middle are doing the same grim sum and reaching for the same coping strategies. Quotes sourced from: Reddit — specifically the subreddits r/ClaudeCode, r/perplexity_ai and r/Anthropic. Every quote below was opened at its permalink and copied verbatim; each is listed with its handle, subreddit and date in the Sources section. We quote experiences, not verdicts — a forum post is one person’s felt reality, and we have framed it as exactly that. The limit that lapses on the 19th The loudest note this fortnight came from Claude Code users watching a date on the calendar. Anthropic had lifted weekly limits by 50% as a promotion, extended it several times, and set it to expire around 19 August — after which allowances fall back to standard. For anyone who had adjusted their workflow to the higher ceiling, the lapse reads as a cut. A user posting as EnthusiasmMountain10 laid out the worry on 14 August: “I’m seeing more tokens burned on tasks that previously felt straightforward, more meandering, and generally less output per unit of usage. At the same time, the 50% usage reduction coming on Aug 19 makes this particularly concerning.” The complaint was double-barrelled: not only is the ceiling dropping, but the same work seems to cost more against it than it used to. That second half — a sense that quality had slipped — ran through the thread. A commenter posting as Captain_Birb put it bluntly: “quality is down.. 4.6 and 4.8 were sharper. Sonnet 5 is seriously a joke — it gets roasted by Opus every time and admits his faults.” Another, TheSassyPlant , descri

Plus: Apple sends out an “unprecedented” number of spyware warnings, Ukraine hits a Russian ecommerce giant with cyber and drone attacks, and more.

A lot of small file jobs still follow the same awkward pattern: choose a file, upload it to someone else's server, wait for processing, download the result. For some tasks, that server round trip is unnecessary. I have been building FileNest Worktools , a browser-based toolkit for repetitive file work, around a simple constraint: If a task can reasonably be done inside the browser, the file contents should stay on the user's device. What currently runs locally The current FileNest tools cover: batch file renaming sequential, reverse, and custom-order renaming JPG / PNG / WebP conversion image resizing and compression image-to-text OCR with editable review PDF merge, split, extract, and images-to-PDF text export to DOCX, PDF, TXT, Markdown, and HTML CSV / TSV / JSON conversion duplicate-file detection For these current browser-local workflows, the file contents are processed on the device rather than being sent to a conversion server. Why local processing matters Privacy is one reason, but it is not the only one. Many file operations do not actually need server-side infrastructure. Renaming a file is mostly about filenames, order, extensions, and conflict checks. Image resizing can be handled with browser APIs. CSV and JSON conversion is essentially local parsing and serialization. Duplicate detection can compare file fingerprints locally. If those jobs can stay inside the browser, there is less network overhead and one less copy of the user's files being created somewhere else. I also wanted the risky parts to stay visible One thing I dislike about many online file tools is the "click and hope" workflow. So I tried to make FileNest show more information before or after processing: renamed files can be previewed before packaging original files are not silently overwritten image compression reports actual output bytes duplicate detection uses content matching rather than filename guesses OCR output can be reviewed and edited the image enhancer does not claim that shar

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, they merely learn general patterns, and once training is done the original data is gone in any meaningful sense. It is a reassuring account, and it is not quite true. Large models memorise fragments of their training data — verbatim, recoverable fragments — and a decade of research has produced reliable ways to detect and extract them. The answer-first version: if your data was in a model’s training set, the model may have memorised identifiable pieces of it, and those pieces can leak. Two families of attack make this concrete. Membership inference works out whether a specific record was in the training data at all. Data extraction pulls memorised content back out word-for-word. Neither is exotic; both are well documented against production systems. This is the mechanism underneath both the newspaper lawsuits alleging near-verbatim reproduction of their articles and the quieter privacy research showing that models leak the people in their training sets. Understanding it is the difference between trusting the comforting story and knowing its limits. Memorisation is a feature of the maths, not a bug Start with why models memorise at all. A large neural network has an enormous number of parameters — enough capacity to do more than compress general patterns. During training it is rewarded for predicting its training data accurately, and one very effective way to predict a specific example accurately is to memorise it. For data that appears once in an unusual form, or many times in an identical form, memorisation is often the path of least resistance for the optimiser. This is measurable. Researchers can show that a model assigns systematically higher confidence, and lower prediction error, to examples it was trained on than to otherwise-similar examples it has never seen. The size of that gap grows with the size of the model

Two years after the U.S. Department of Justice alleged that TikTok violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, it has reached a $400 million settlement.

The private Android-based OS will expand beyond Pixels next year.

Some Americans fear the FTC may be thinking about personalized pricing all wrong.

Hey everyone! 👋 Like many developers and sysadmins, I constantly find myself needing to share temporary credentials, API keys, or sensitive text with clients and coworkers. Dropping these straight into Slack, Discord, or standard email always feels like a massive security headache because those chat platforms store everything in plain text in their databases. I looked into popular "one-time secret" web utilities, but I noticed a major flaw: almost all of them handle the encryption and decryption on their servers. That means you have to blindly trust their backend configurations, logging policies, and database security. I wanted something truly zero-knowledge where the server owner physically couldn't read the notes even if they wanted to. So, I built ScorchNote : https://scorchnote.com 🛠️ How it Works (Under the Hood) To achieve absolute zero-knowledge, ScorchNote relies on strict client-side mechanics: Browser-Side Encryption: When you type a secret, the data is encrypted directly in your browser before it ever leaves your network interface. The URL Hash Advantage: The decryption key is generated and stored inside the URL's hash fragment (everything after the # ). Zero Server Footprint: Web browsers never send the hash fragment to the host server during HTTP requests. This means my database only receives a completely scrambled, encrypted payload. The server has no concept of what the key is. Millisecond Burn-on-Read: The moment the recipient visits the link, the encrypted payload is fetched and instantly purged from the server database. 🚀 Try It Out I kept the page entirely lightweight, minimalist, and completely free of bloated tracking scripts. It’s built to do exactly one job, safely and instantly. I would love to hear your thoughts on the architecture, the user experience, or what features you think I should cook up next! Check it out here: ScorchNote

I recently built filetools, a suite of file utilities that run entirely in the browser. No server backend, no file uploads, no data collection. The Problem Existing tools for CSV extraction, PDF manipulation, and table conversion often require uploading files or creating accounts. That creates friction and privacy concerns. But these tasks are fundamentally simple: extracting text from a PDF or parsing a CSV can happen entirely in JavaScript. The Solution filetools is a collection of single-purpose utilities: PDF Tools: Merge, split, rotate PDFs Extract tables from PDFs to CSV Convert bank statements to CSV Data Tools: Extract tables from HTML to CSV or JSON Convert between XLSX, JSON, YAML, and CSV Remove duplicate lines, sort CSV files, merge/compare data files Each tool is its own page, targeting one specific task without bloat. Architecture Why static hosting? Keeps infrastructure simple and costs near zero. Files are built once, served from GitHub Pages. Why client-side only? User files never leave their machine. Processing is fast (no network round-trip). Privacy is the default. Tech stack: vanilla JavaScript using npm libraries (pdfjs-dist, exceljs, js-yaml, pdf-lib) - no framework, no server. Each page is roughly 5-15KB gzipped. Design: Started with demand mining, looking at actual Google search queries and autocomplete suggestions to pick which tools to build first. What's Next Live site: https://usefiletools.com/?utm_source=dev.to&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=filetools-launch I'm building more tools based on real search demand. If there's a file utility you've always wished existed, especially for data professionals, I'd love to hear about it.

If you installed the Midnight wallet SDK a while back and pinned the package names, your imports are now pointing at a deprecated scope. Nothing is broken yet. But the packages you depend on moved, and the old names are living on borrowed time. Here is what changed, why it matters, and the one gotcha that trips people up. The short version The wallet SDK packages moved from the @midnight-ntwrk scope (with a dash) to @midnightntwrk (no dash). @midnight-ntwrk/wallet-sdk-facade -> @midnightntwrk/wallet-sdk-facade The old dashed packages still install, so your build keeps working for now. They are published as a transitional alias. But the dashed scope is deprecated, and the newest releases only show up on the new no-dash scope. So you want to move over. There is one exception. @midnight-ntwrk/ledger-v8 stays on the dashed scope. Do not rename that one. More on that below. What actually changed Straight from the wallet SDK v1.2.0 release notes: the npm scope has changed from @midnight-ntwrk to @midnightntwrk (no dash). New installs should depend on @midnightntwrk/* . The old @midnight-ntwrk/* packages continue to be published as a transitional alias during the migration window, so existing consumers keep working, but the dashed scope is deprecated. So both scopes exist on npm right now. That is why nothing breaks. But they are not equal. The no-dash scope is where the active releases land, and the dashed scope lags behind. You can see it yourself. Here are the current latest versions, dashed vs no-dash: Package Dashed (old) No-dash (new) wallet-sdk-facade 4.0.1 4.1.0 wallet-sdk-hd 3.0.2 3.0.3 wallet-sdk-shielded 3.0.1 3.0.2 wallet-sdk-dust-wallet 4.1.0 4.2.0 If you stay on the dashed names, you quietly get the older packages. The version fixes and new features go to the no-dash scope first. The gotcha: ledger-v8 does not move This is the part that catches people. When you do a find and replace across your project, it is tempting to swap every @midnight-ntwrk for @midnig

WhatsApp is testing Scam Alert in limited beta, using on device machine learning to detect potential scam messages from non contacts. Meta's architecture keeps message content on the device while using confidential computing, Oblivious HTTP, differential privacy, and model transparency to measure performance and protect model delivery. By Leela Kumili

GrapheneOS 2027 Lands on Flagship Phones: Real‑World Privacy for Premium Android Users Introduction When GrapheneOS announced official support for Motorola, OnePlus and Sony’s top‑tier phones in early 2027, the tech community stopped scrolling. Within days the phrase “GrapheneOS Motorola” spiked 250 % on Google Trends and sparked a firestorm on Hacker News. Why the hype? Because for the first time a hardened, auditable Android fork is available on devices that don’t compromise on performance, camera quality, or design. In this guide you’ll get a hands‑on look at what GrapheneOS 2027 actually does, how to install it, and which commands and configuration tweaks let you turn a flagship phone into a privacy‑first workstation. Quick‑Start Checklist ✅ Item 1 Verify device compatibility (locked bootloader, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, TEE) 2 Backup current ROM (e.g., adb backup -apk -shared -all -f backup.ab ) 3 Unlock bootloader ( fastboot oem unlock ) – note this wipes data 4 Flash GrapheneOS boot and system images (see “Flashing the ROM”) 5 Enable verified boot ( fastboot flashing lock ) 6 Install the optional Play Store Compatibility Layer (PSCL) if needed Supported Premium Devices (2027) Manufacturer Model Key Security HW Motorola Edge 30 Ultra Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, TEE, Secure Enclave OnePlus 12 Pro Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, TEE, Secure Enclave Sony Xperia 1 V Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, TEE, Secure Enclave Google Pixel 9 (reference) Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, Titan M2 All listed phones meet GrapheneOS’s Hardware Security Module (HSM) requirements: locked bootloader, hardware‑backed keystore, and a modern Trusted Execution Environment. How GrapheneOS Differs from Stock Android Feature Stock Android GrapheneOS 2027 Google Play Services Core system component, heavy telemetry Replaced by a sandboxed Play Store Compatibility Layer (PSCL) Kernel Standard Linux kernel with optional vendor patches Memory‑safe, mitigates Spectre/Meltdown, SELinux Enforcing by default App Sandbox Permissions granted per‑app

The people-search tool ClarityCheck says its reverse image search service is “private and secure”—but it left a database containing more than 9 million image files exposed.

Flock’s surveillance cameras have already sparked outrage. WIRED reconstructed its next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, to confirm it goes much further than tracking license plates.

I work with PGP regularly and I work with it across multiple operating systems. Linux on my workstation, a MacBook on the go and every now and then I have to touch Windows. And on every single one of them, PGP means a different tool: Kleopatra on Linux, GPG Keychain on Mac, Gpg4win on Windows (which is Kleopatra again, just wrapped differently). Three tools, three UIs, three sets of quirks, three different workflows and none of them are what I'd call user-friendly. And yes, i know: the GnuPG CLI is the same everywhere, and it's a great tool. I use it. But gpg --encrypt --sign --armor -r test@key.com is not something I want to type 100 times a day and it's definitely not something I can give to a non-technical colleague. Every time I had to walk someone through encrypting or decrypting a message, I lost a bit of hope. So I made it my mission to finally build something better: PGP Manager . A free and open-source desktop app that looks and works the same on Linux, Mac and Windows. Why another PGP Tool? The cryptography behind OpenPGP is mature and has been trusted for decades. The problem was never the crypto, it's the workflow and the fragmentation. Encrypting a message for a colleague shouldn't require different tools per OS and a wiki page. My goal was simple: all the everyday PGP tasks in one place, without dumbing anything down or inventing a new format. PGP Manager is not a new crypto system. It uses gopenpgp v3 (ProtonMail's OpenPGP library) and standard OpenPGP (RFC 4880), so it stays fully compatible with GPG, Kleopatra, Thunderbird and the rest. You can leave anytime, your keys are just standard armored files. One more thing that sets it apart from the tools above: they're all frontends for a local GnuPG installation. PGP Manager brings its own OpenPGP implementation, so there's nothing else to install. It can still read an existing GnuPG keyring if you have one, but it doesn't need it. That's also what makes the standalone/USB mode possible in the first pla