Privacy

December 2025

• Dec 29, 2025TechnologyData Protection Basics: How to Secure Sensitive InformationYahoo took three years to notice that all three billion of its accounts had been compromised in 2013, and the failures were ordinary: security questions kept in plaintext, passwords hashed with MD5, access controls too weak to spot years of exfiltration. Verizon cut its purchase price by $350 million, and the SEC collected $35 million for the late disclosure. This guide covers classification, encryption, key management, least privilege, and backups that survive ransomware.24 MIN21.6k
• Dec 28, 2025TechnologyIntegrating Privacy by Design in SystemsApple's App Tracking Transparency made cross-app tracking require explicit permission, with no tracking as the default. Flurry Analytics measured global opt-in at roughly 13 to 14 percent, leaving about 85 percent of iOS users untrackable across third-party apps. Meta disclosed the change cost it $10 billion in 2022 ad revenue. That is what a default is worth. This covers Cavoukian's seven principles, data minimization and the main privacy-enhancing technologies.21 MIN27.3k
• Dec 27, 2025TechnologyPrivacy vs Security: Understanding Key DifferencesThe infrastructure Snowden exposed in 2013 was hardened, encrypted, access-controlled and monitored around the clock. The crisis came not from insecurity but from collecting billions of people's communications without consent. Security asks who is authorized to access this; privacy asks whether the individual consents to this use. The threat models differ: attackers versus the organizations legitimately holding your data.27 MIN3.5k

June 2025

• Jun 10, 2025ExplainersHow Encryption Protects DataSecurity comes from the key, not from hiding the method: Kerckhoffs stated in 1883 that a system should stay secure even if everything but the key is public, so AES, RSA and TLS are all published openly. TLS uses asymmetric cryptography only for the handshake, then switches to symmetric encryption for speed. Enigma offered roughly 158 quintillion settings and still fell to procedural weaknesses, which is why key management, not algorithm strength, is the usual failure point.47 MIN44.6k

October 2024

• Oct 31, 2024TechnologyProtecting Your Online Privacy: Effective MethodsEnglehardt and Narayanan's OpenWPM measurement also found fingerprinting scripts on pages where nobody would expect commercial tracking, which is why incognito mode alone changes little. Kashmir Hill's 2019 experiment blocking the five big tech companies showed how deep the dependency runs, since blocking one provider broke logins on unrelated sites. The page ranks fixes by impact, starting with a password manager, 2FA and browser choice.15 MIN5.4k

July 2023

• Jul 24, 2023TechnologyWhat Is End-to-End Encryption and Its SignificanceThose were the account creation timestamp and the date of last connection, because the system was built so nothing more exists to hand over. Telegram is the common misunderstanding, since regular chats are not end-to-end encrypted by default and group chats have no such option at all. The page also explains why backdoors cannot be made safe: the math cannot tell a lawful request from an unlawful one.14 MIN12.9k