标签：#Privacy

Meta might be the next company to make an always-on AI wearable. The company is working on prototype "super sensing" always-aware smart glasses that could continuously record audio and snap photos "every few seconds," according to the Financial Times. The wearer could then ask Meta AI about the captured audio and images. However, the images […]

Matomo is an open-source web analytics platform that keeps full ownership of visitor data on infrastructure you control, a privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics. This guide deploys Matomo using Docker Compose with a MariaDB backend, Nginx as the entry point, and Certbot issuing the TLS certificate before the stack goes live. By the end, you'll have Matomo tracking a website with a signed HTTPS certificate at your domain. Prepare Docker $ sudo usermod -aG docker $USER $ newgrp docker Set Up the Project 1. Create the project directory: $ mkdir matomo && cd matomo 2. Open the firewall: $ sudo ufw allow 80/tcp $ sudo ufw allow 443/tcp 3. Create the environment file: $ nano .env MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD = your_strong_mysql_root_password MYSQL_PASSWORD = your_strong_mysql_matomo_password Use passwords of at least 16 characters. 4. Create the Nginx config: $ mkdir nginx $ nano nginx/matomo.conf server { listen 80 ; server_name matomo.example.com ; location /.well-known/acme-challenge/ { root /var/www/certbot ; } location / { return 301 https:// $host$request_uri ; } } server { listen 443 ssl http2 ; server_name matomo.example.com ; ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/matomo.example.com/fullchain.pem ; ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/matomo.example.com/privkey.pem ; location / { proxy_pass http://app:80 ; proxy_set_header Host $host ; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr ; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for ; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme ; } } Replace every matomo.example.com occurrence with your domain — it appears in both server blocks and the certificate paths. Deploy with Docker Compose $ nano docker-compose.yaml services : db : image : mariadb:11.4 command : --max-allowed-packet=64MB restart : always volumes : - matomo-db-data:/var/lib/mysql environment : - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=${MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD} - MYSQL_DATABASE=matomo - MYSQL_USER=matomo - MYSQL_PASSWORD=${MYSQL_PASSWORD} networks : - matomo-net app : image

Plausible Analytics is an open-source, self-hosted web analytics tool that tracks traffic without cookies or personal data collection, a privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics. This guide deploys Plausible Community Edition using Docker Compose, fronts it with Nginx, and secures it with a Let's Encrypt certificate. By the end, you'll have Plausible tracking a website's traffic securely at your domain. Configure the Environment 1. Clone the Community Edition repo: $ mkdir ~/plausible $ cd ~/plausible $ git clone https://github.com/plausible/community-edition.git $ cd community-edition 2. Generate a secret key: $ openssl rand -base64 64 | tr -d '\n' 3. Create the environment file: $ nano .env ADMIN_USER_EMAIL = admin@example.com ADMIN_USER_NAME = admin ADMIN_USER_PWD = ADMIN_PASSWORD BASE_URL = https://plausible.example.com SECRET_KEY_BASE = YOUR_SECRET_KEY_BASE DATABASE_URL = postgres://postgres:postgres@plausible_db:5432/plausible_db CLICKHOUSE_DATABASE_URL = http://plausible_events_db:8123/plausible_events_db Fill in your email, a strong admin password, your domain, and the secret key generated above. 4. Expose the app port via a Compose override (auto-merged with compose.yml ): $ nano compose.override.yaml services : plausible : ports : - 127.0.0.1:8000:8000 Deploy with Docker Compose $ docker compose up -d $ docker compose ps Confirm the app, Postgres, and ClickHouse (events DB) containers are all running. Front with Nginx and Let's Encrypt 1. Install Nginx: $ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install nginx -y 2. Create the virtual host: $ sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/plausible.conf server { listen 80 ; listen [::]:80 ; server_name plausible.example.com ; access_log /var/log/nginx/plausible.access.log ; error_log /var/log/nginx/plausible.error.log ; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000 ; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for ; proxy_http_version 1.1 ; proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade ; proxy_set_header Connection "Upgr

Disclosure: I write about projects in the OpenNomos ecosystem, including Swipe Cleaner. The Problem With Photo Cleaners Most photo cleaning apps have a dirty secret: your photos leave your device. They get uploaded to some server for "AI processing," "cloud analysis," or just because the developer didn't think about it. Swipe Cleaner takes the opposite approach. Everything happens on your iPhone. Not a single pixel leaves your device. Let me break down why that matters, and how it actually works under the hood. The Architecture Swipe Cleaner is built on three principles: 1. On-device processing, always. Image analysis, duplicate detection, and similarity matching all run locally using Apple's Core ML and Vision frameworks. No cloud roundtrips, no server costs, no privacy policy loopholes. 2. Tinder-style UX for decisions. You don't manage a grid of thumbnails and checkboxes. You swipe. Right to keep, left to delete. This isn't just a UI gimmick — it's a deliberate choice to reduce decision fatigue. When you have 3,000 photos to clean, you need flow, not friction. 3. Sandboxed storage access. The app requests permission for exactly what it needs. It doesn't ask for your entire photo library if you only want to clean screenshots. This is iOS privacy-by-design done right. Why On-Device Matters Now We're in a weird moment. AI capabilities are exploding, which means the temptation to "send it to the cloud for better results" is stronger than ever. But at the same time, Apple is pushing hard in the opposite direction — Private Cloud Compute, on-device ML, differential privacy. Swipe Cleaner aligns with where the platform is going, not where the industry has been. The Technical Trade-offs Local-first isn't free. Here's what you give up: Model size constraints. You can't run a 70B parameter vision model on an iPhone. The models need to be small, optimized, and ruthlessly efficient. No cross-device sync. Your cleaning decisions stay on one device. No cloud means no sync. For

Anthropic accused of spying on users; engineer says “experiment” is over.

I've long argued that Hollywood has simultaneously set and ruined our expectations for smart glasses. But after binge-watching two seasons of Netflix's A Man on the Inside, this is perhaps the first time I've seen Hollywood, perhaps inadvertently, illustrate the biggest cultural problem with smart glasses as they stand today. In a nutshell, Ted Danson […]

InfoQ has opened enrollment for a five-week AI Security & Privacy Engineering cohort for senior engineers and architects in regulated industries, focused on applying security, privacy, threat modeling, observability, and governance practices to production AI systems. By Artenisa Chatziou

If your memory is hosted, your thoughts are leased. We did not just move our files to the cloud. We moved our working memory. Andy Clark and David Chalmers called it the extended mind in 1998. The thesis was simple. Cognition leaks into the tools we trust. A notebook can be part of your mind if you access it reliably. In 2026, that notebook is a vector database owned by a platform with a legal department. Your extended mind now has terms of service, retention policies, and a compliance team that answers subpoenas faster than you answer email. I am not interested in nostalgia for paper. I am interested in architecture that preserves agency. The fix is not to think less with machines. It is to think locally with machines you control. That is why I built a second brain that lives on a Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe and a Hailo-8 accelerator, running Retrieval Augmented Generation completely offline. No API keys. No telemetry. No third party that can be compelled to hand over your associative graph. This is the expanded blueprint. More cohesive, more rigorous, and more useful than the usual cloud versus local sermon. The extended mind, now with a landlord The original extended mind argument was about trust and coupling. If you reach for a tool as automatically as you reach for a memory, it counts as cognition. The cloud broke that coupling by inserting a landlord. Your retrieval is fast, but it is also observed, logged, ranked, and retained. Three consequences follow. First, epistemic pollution. When your queries train their models, your future answers are shaped by everyone else’s queries. Your private context gets diluted by the median user. Second, legal exposure. Your prompts, your uploads, your retrieval history, and your embeddings are business records. In many jurisdictions they are discoverable. You cannot plead the fifth for data you gave to a provider. Third, strategic fragility. A policy change, a price hike, a region block, and your cognitive prosthesis goes dark.

I’m building Euro Toolhub , a German-first index of European software, SaaS, cloud and AI alternatives. The idea is simple: many companies, agencies, developers and privacy-conscious users want alternatives to common tools when they care about things like data residency, open source, self-hosting, European jurisdiction or reducing dependency on non-European providers. But most existing lists stop at listing tools. I want Euro Toolhub to go one step further. Each provider profile can include: country and jurisdiction category alternative-to mappings open source status self-hosting availability EU data residency DPA availability certifications where known target audience strengths and limitations a transparent sovereignty score embeddable badges for providers The project starts in German because the first target market is DACH, but the structure is prepared for more languages later. The long-term vision is to build a practical decision platform for digital sovereignty: not just “which European alternatives exist?”, but “which one fits my actual use case?” Current categories include web analytics, cloud and hosting, newsletter tools, CRM, email, password managers, AI APIs, project management, video conferencing and e-signatures. I’m looking for feedback from developers, SaaS founders, privacy people and self-hosting communities: Which European tools should be added? Which categories matter most? What would make a sovereignty score trustworthy? Should the provider dataset be opened through GitHub for corrections and submissions? Project: https://www.euro-toolhub.eu/de Provider submission: https://www.euro-toolhub.eu/de/anbieter-eintragen ``

Claude models reached GA on Microsoft Foundry with Azure-native billing and governance, but no European data zone exists. Anthropic's own documentation confirms data residency guarantees apply to Bedrock and Vertex AI but not Foundry. European practitioners from banking and healthcare report the offering is unapproved for production. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Privacy isn't a checkbox. It's not a statement in your terms of service. It's not a toggle in your settings app. Privacy is architecture. And most apps get this backwards. The Architecture Test Here's a simple test for any app that claims to be "privacy-first": If your server goes down, can anyone still access user data? If the answer is yes, your privacy is a policy question — not a technical guarantee. You've built a system where trust in the company replaces trust in the code. Every photo cleaner that uploads your images to a server has already failed this test. The moment data leaves your device, privacy becomes something you promise rather than something you enforce . What On-Device Processing Actually Means When we built Swipe Cleaner, we made one architectural decision that defined everything else: zero data leaves the phone . This means: No cloud processing of photos No API calls that transmit image data No server-side storage of any kind Every scan, every classification, every cleanup happens locally The app is 4.7 MB. That's it. There's nothing to hide because there's nowhere to hide anything. Why Architecture Beats Policy Companies spend millions on legal teams writing privacy policies that their architecture contradicts. They collect data "to improve the service" while the service could have been designed to not need that data in the first place. Policy-based privacy Architecture-based privacy "We promise not to misuse your data" "We can't misuse data we never have" Requires ongoing trust Verifiable by anyone Can change with an update to ToS Requires rewriting the entire app Compliance-driven Principle-driven The Trust Problem Here's what I've learned building privacy-focused tools: users can't verify your privacy policy. They can't audit your servers. They can't check if you're actually deleting their data after processing. But they can verify that an app never sends their photos anywhere. They can check network traffic. They can inspect the binary. Tha

Everyone is talking. Almost no one is thinking. Your morning starts with a vibration, then another, then a pile-on. Slack wants a status update. Instagram wants your face. A group chat you muted in March has resurrected itself to debate brunch. By 9:07 am you have done the emotional labor of a small call center and you have not finished your coffee. We call this being connected. A more honest word is being farmed. The internet does not pay you for your best ideas. It pays you for your fastest replies. Availability became a virtue, then a job description, then a personality. Silence got rebranded as flaking. I decided to rebrand it back, but with better tools. Not the aesthetic digital detox where you post a grainy photo of trees with “offline” in lowercase and then lurk from a finsta. I mean real disappearance. The kind where your work still ships, your people still feel held, your money still moves, and you are simply not there to watch the conveyor belt. You do not need to quit. You need to quit performing presence. The Attention Tax Is Real, and You Are Overdrawn Every ping is a micro-withdrawal from your nervous system. You pay in focus, in mood, in the ability to finish a thought. Platforms collect the interest. Researchers at UC Irvine have been tracking this for years. After an interruption it takes roughly 23 minutes to get back to the original task. The average knowledge worker gets interrupted 80 to 90 times a day. Do the multiplication and you realize most people never actually get back. They just start new half-tasks until bedtime. We treat this like a willpower problem. It is an architecture problem. Your phone is designed to win. You will not out-discipline a trillion-dollar attention refinery. You have to change the plumbing. Silence is not doing nothing. Silence is compound interest for your brain. Ten uninterrupted minutes today becomes a finished essay next week becomes a body of work next year. The people who seem calm are not morally superior. Th

Plus: Alleged Scattered Spider hacking member extradited, dozens of license plate reader errors, and Indian officials are concerned about WhatsApp’s username rollout.

OAuth recovery emails look harmless until you test them the lazy way. A team sends password reset links or recovery codes into one shared mailbox, confirms that something arrived, and marks the job done. From a security view, that test is too weak. It can hide token reuse, wrong-user delivery, or log retention that exposes sensitive account events. For non-production checks, I like using a disposable email address that belongs to one test run. Some teams build that inbox layer themselves, some use tempmailso, but the core principle is the same: isolate the recovery event, inspect it quickly, and delete the evidence you no longer need. That is helpful when Authentication and OAuth changes ship together. Why OAuth recovery emails deserve their own threat model Recovery email tests are not just "did the mail send?" checks. They sit on the edge of account takeover risk, so the message itself matters almost as much as the login flow. A decent threat model for these emails should ask: did the message reach only the intended inbox for this run? does the link or code expire when the product says it does? is the message revealing too much user data in subject lines or previews? can an older token still be used after a new recovery request? do logs or test fixtures keep the recovery secret longer than they should? This is where shared inboxes become dangerous in a subtle way. Even if nobody has bad intent, mixed test data makes it harder to prove which token belonged to which request. The same operational confusion shows up in email change confirmation checks , and it gets worse when the email can restore account access. OWASP recommends testing authentication recovery features with the same care as sign-in and session controls, because weak recovery paths are a common bypass route for stronger primary login defenses: https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Forgot_Password_Cheat_Sheet.html A safer test flow for recovery links and codes The cleanest pattern is one inbox

It's a big year for America. It's the semiquincentennial, otherwise known as America250, and the United States is cohosting the World Cup. But spectators at these events - and the millions of people who live in the cities hosting them - may not realize that they, too, are being watched. From Kansas City to New […]

Todo projeto que envolve autenticação via telefone acaba esbarrando no mesmo problema chato: como testar isso de verdade? Você não pode ficar digitando seu próprio número toda vez que roda um fluxo de cadastro. Definitivamente não deveria pedir para os colegas de equipe cederem o deles. E a maioria dos pipelines de CI não tem uma pessoa sentada ali, pronta para ler uma mensagem de texto e digitar o código num formulário. É uma daquelas coisas que parecem pequenas até você estar três sprints dentro de um projeto com 2FA via SMS e perceber que a cobertura de teste desse fluxo inteiro é "testei uma vez, manualmente, antes do almoço". Por Que a Verificação por Telefone É Complicada de Testar A maioria dos fluxos de autenticação de um stack típico é fácil de automatizar. Verificação por e-mail, dá para interceptar com uma caixa de entrada de teste ou um serviço de captura de e-mails. Tokens de sessão, dá para mockar. Redefinição de senha, você controla o loop inteiro. O SMS quebra esse padrão porque o código precisa sair completamente do seu sistema, ser entregue por uma rede de telecomunicação real e voltar antes que o teste possa continuar. Essa ida e volta introduz vários pontos de falha que não têm nada a ver com o seu código: atrasos de operadora, filtros de spam, peculiaridades de entrega por região, limites de taxa. Se você já viu um pipeline de CI falhar numa etapa de verificação por telefone e depois passar numa nova tentativa sem nenhuma mudança de código, é quase sempre por causa disso. O instinto de muitas equipes é pegar um número público gratuito de um dos vários sites de "receber SMS online" para checagens manuais rápidas. Isso funciona bem para uma verificação pontual. Mas desmorona rápido quando você tenta automatizar, porque esses números são compartilhados potencialmente por milhares de outras pessoas usando o mesmo pool. Códigos podem se perder numa caixa de entrada lotada, o próprio número pode já estar bloqueado pela plataforma que você está testand

You need to hand a dataset of Chilean RUTs to an outside analytics team. They will join it against other tables by identifier, run the cohort analysis, and hand back a model. They do not need to know, and should never learn, who any of these people are. Asterisk the RUT column and the join dies on contact: **********-K matches every other asterisked RUT in the file. Not almost every one. Every one. You need the same input to reappear as the same output, shaped like a real, check-digit-valid identifier the rest of your schema still recognizes, and eight weeks later, when a fraud investigator needs the original RUT back for one row, you need to be able to give it to them. Irreversible masking cannot do any of this. Hashing gets you consistency but not the format, and never the value back. What you need is format-preserving encryption: run a digit string through a cipher and get out another digit string, same length, same shape, that decrypts to the original under the key you hold. Nothing else. What FPE actually does MaskOps exposes this as mask_pii_fpe . It masks digit-based PII, cards, phones, RUT, CPF, Argentine DNI, in place, and gives back something the same length and shape: import maskops import secrets key = secrets . token_bytes ( 32 ) # AES-256, client holds this tweak = secrets . token_bytes ( 7 ) # per-column/per-dataset context df . with_columns ( maskops . mask_pii_fpe ( " rut_column " , key , tweak )) 76.354.771-K becomes some other RUT-shaped, check-digit-valid string of the same length, under this key and tweak. Run it back through with the same key and tweak and it decrypts. Non-digit PII, IBAN, VAT, email, IP, EU national IDs, gets none of this. It always asterisks. There is no clean digit domain to encrypt into, so MaskOps does not pretend there is. The key never touches MaskOps' output. The client generates it, holds it, and passes it in at call time, and because MaskOps makes no network call and keeps no storage layer, there is nowhere for that k

Every major cloud provider sells a key management service, and most sell a "bring your own key" option layered on top, marketed as the difference between trusting the provider and trusting yourself. The pitch is clean. The mechanics underneath are not, and the part that actually determines who can read your data is rarely the part the sales page shows you. If you've provisioned storage on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure in the last few years, you've seen the encryption-at-rest checkbox: "encrypt with a key you manage." It sounds like a meaningful control. In practice it's three different architectures wearing the same marketing label, and they don't provide the same guarantee. What a KMS Actually Does A cloud Key Management Service is a hosted service that generates, stores, and performs operations with cryptographic keys on your behalf. When you ask a KMS to encrypt something, in most cases the plaintext key material never leaves the service's boundary. What you get back is a ciphertext blob and, for envelope encryption schemes, a wrapped data key you can use locally. The design goal is real: keys shouldn't sit in application memory or config files where a compromised host can grab them. The question that matters is not "does a KMS exist in this architecture" but "who can invoke it, and under what legal or operational conditions." That's where customer-managed keys and bring-your-own-key start to diverge in ways the naming doesn't make obvious. Customer-Managed Keys vs Bring-Your-Own-Key Customer-managed keys (CMK) means the key was generated inside the provider's KMS, under your account, and you control the access policy: who can use it, when it rotates, whether it can be disabled. The key material itself still lives entirely inside the provider's infrastructure. You never see the raw bytes. You're managing permissions on a key you didn't generate and can't export. Bring-your-own-key (BYOK) means you generate the key material yourself, outside the provider's environme

Apple chose Google Cloud to run Private Cloud Compute outside its own data centers for the first time, using NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, Intel TDX, and Google's Titan chip. Apple maintains an independent append-only hardware ledger and dual-vendor attestation roots. AWS and Azure are not part of the collaboration. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Research appears to reveal a bug that could render the feature effectively useless.