Privacy ​

I try to be aware of my digital fingerprint on the Internet. Who owns the data I create and the data traces I leave.

I made a repository to share all the various alternatives to popular often centralized and free services that are available. And I wrote an article with some of my thoughts on the matter.

I use Hosts and Wipr for both mac & iOS to limit tracking.

And I have deep interest in Differential privacy and Homomorphic encryption.

Notes ​

• Facebook is not a private nor a secure platform for sharing sensitive information. Every character that you type into their text boxes is immediately parsed and sent to their servers, regardless of whether you actually complete a post and submit it.
• Marketing most importantly is about establishing wants that you didn't have.
• Apple spent the entire summer telling the public that they were confident they could resist government pressure, when defending their CSAM scanning system. Today they’re pulling voting guides from the Russian App Store. (HN)
• Go through your Google app permissions and revoke old apps. Some may have full access to Gmail/Calendar & you don't use them.

Links ​

• Security Checklist - Open source checklist of resources designed to improve your online privacy and security.
• Digital Privacy Tips
• Hosts - Extending and consolidating hosts files from several well-curated sources.
• Privacy Lab: Jay Freeman on "How to Get a Dystopia"
• We are building a dystopia just to make people click on ads
• Monologue of the Algorithm: how Facebook turns users data into its profit
• blocklists - Shared lists of problem domains people may want to block with hosts files.
• Beyond The Clouds
• A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Cookies
• Why Zuckerberg’s 14-year apology tour hasn’t fixed Facebook
• Against Facebook
• Google embraces, extends, and extinguishes
• Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
• Keynote address from Tim Cook, CEO, Apple Inc (2018)
• HN: How Facebook tracks you on Android (2018)
• Facebook’s Privacy Cake (2019)
• The New Wilderness (2019)
• Getting my personal data out of Facebook - I left Facebook, and all I got was this lousy legalese.
• Bitcoin 2019: A Conversation with Edward Snowden
• Differential Privacy by Google - Contains a C++ library of ε-differentially private algorithms, which can be used to produce aggregate statistics over numeric data sets containing private or sensitive information.
• Privatar - Unlock the advantage of data-driven insights while ensuring data privacy.
• How China Tracks Everyone | VICE on HBO (2019)
• Degoogle: Alternatives to Google products, privacy tips, tricks, links (HN) (HN) (HN)
• The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It (2020) (Tweet)
• Am I Unique? - Aims at studying the diversity of browser fingerprints and providing developers with data to help them design good defenses. (HN)
• How do you talk to "I have nothing to hide" people? (2020)
• Personal Security Checklist - Curated checklist of tips to protect your dgital security and privacy. (HN) (Web) (HN)
• The Case for Privacy Optimism (2020)
• Energized Protection - block - Let's make an annoyance free, better open internet, altogether.
• Programming Framework for Differential Privacy with Accuracy Concentration Bounds (2019)
• Honeycrisp: Large-scale Differentially Private Aggregation Without a Trusted Core
• Taking control of your own data (2020)
• We Chat, They Watch (2020) - How International Users Unwittingly Build up WeChat’s Chinese Censorship Apparatus. (HN)
• EFF - Leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.
• Metomic - Privacy Tools for Developers.
• How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices (2020)
• Why Privacy Matters (2020) (HN)
• Nym - Developing the infrastructure to prevent this data leakage and provide people with strong internet privacy. (Bonding vs (Delegated) Staking in Nym)
• Your Phone Is Your Castle (HN)
• Threat Models for Differential Privacy (2020)
• Sekreta - Universal internet-anonymity API with privacy-enhancing subsystem.
• Kovri - Free, decentralized, anonymity technology based on I2P's open specifications.
• Mute - Privacy enhancing communication system.
• HN: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption (2020)
• Purism - Beautiful, Secure, Privacy-Respecting Laptops & Phones.
• Purism – Fund Your App (HN)
• Steps For Better Online Privacy (2020) (HN)
• No More Google - Privacy-friendly alternatives to Google that don't track you. (HN)
• Productivity vs. Privacy (2020)
• Your Computer Isn't Yours (2020) (HN)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation - Defending your rights in the digital world.
• The magic of Gaussian noise (2020) - Part of a series on differential privacy.
• Amnesia - Data anonymization made easy.
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Online Anonymity (Code)
• Awesome Privacy - List of free, open source and privacy respecting services.
• Awesome Privacy 2
• Awesome Privacy 3
• WhoTracks.me - Bringing Transparency to Online Tracking. (Code)
• What I Use Now Instead of Google (2021) (HN)
• Ask HN: Is it technically possible to evade big-tech censorship? (2021)
• Data Security on Mobile Devices
• The Hairdresser Analogy (2021) (HN)
• Moxie Marlinspike Has a Plan to Reclaim Our Privacy (2020) (HN)
• We can do better than Signal (2021) (HN) (Lobsters)
• Tim Cook keynote on privacy from the CPCD conference (2021) (Transcript)
• What Do You Actually Agree To When You Accept All Cookies (2021) (Lobsters)
• How Corporations Harvest Data (HN)
• Zero Data App - Curated collection of five best-in-class libraries/frameworks that enable building SPA apps with user controlled data. (HN) (Awesome)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Online Anonymity
• Blacklight - Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector.
• Data Leverage Roundup
• FBPCS (Facebook Private Computation Service)
• Phantom Analyzer - Simple, real-time website scanner to see trackers that collect info about you.
• PrivacyTools - Encryption Against Global Mass Surveillance. (Code)
• Safing - Monitor All Network Activity. Block Mass Surveillance. (Code) (HN)
• Getting more useful results with differential privacy (2021)
• Moving away from Google services, 8 years in (2021)
• Thinking about “traceability” (2021) (HN)
• Messaging and Chat Control (2021) - New EU Law Removes Digital Privacy. (HN)
• Apple’s Mistake (2021) (HN)
• Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to? (2021)
• Privacy.Sexy - Enforce privacy & security on Windows and macOS. (Code)
• Why not Signal? (Lobsters)
• Google and Facebook, I am facilitating packet filtering to block your tracking (2021) (Lobsters)
• Open Privacy Vault - Open Source PII as a Service. (Code)
• Privacy Redirect - Web extension that redirects Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Google Maps, Reddit, Google Search, & Google Translate requests to privacy friendly alternatives.
• Differentially Private Fine-tuning of Language Models (2021) (Tweet)
• GDPR documents - Your Right to be Informed and Erased.
• Privacy Is a Human Right (2021) (HN)
• Fides - Declaratively enforce your data privacy requirements from within your software development life-cycle. (Docs)
• Practical Differentially Private Clustering (2021)
• Securing your digital life (2021)
• A Right to Reasonable Inferences: Re-Thinking Data Protection Law in the Age of Big Data and AI (2019) (Tweet)
• Gretel.ai - Privacy Engineering as a Service. (Twitter) (GitHub)
• NTC Forum - Discussion board for network censorship all around the world, with anti-censorship software developers, researchers and tech-savvy users.
• Programming Differential Privacy - Book about differential privacy, for programmers.
• Saying goodbye to an old friend (2021) (HN)
• Plume: Differential Privacy at Scale (2022) (Tweet)
• Ask HN: Whats the tech stack that top-tier hackers use for staying undetectable? (2022)
• Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)
• Be anonymous (2022) (HN)
• Privacy Guides - Protect your data against global mass surveillance programs. (Code)
• Google AI Blog: Federated Learning with Formal Differential Privacy Guarantees (2022)
• Sarus - Privacy-preserving data access for analytics/AI. (HN)
• Farside - Redirecting service for FOSS alternative frontends.
• Ask HN: How to move away from Google (2022)
• Hitchhiker's Guide to Online Anonymity
• Lowering the cost of anonymization (2020)
• Janus - Experimental implementation of the Privacy Preserving Measurement (PPM) specification.
• GAFAM - Completely block Google and its services.
• Two types of privacy (2022)
• PrivacyRaven - Privacy Testing for Deep Learning.
• GDPR for Developers by Example (2022) (HN)
• mCaptcha - No-nonsense CAPTCHA system with seamless UX. (HN)
• Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser (2022) (HN) (Lobsters)
• Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy? (2022)
• The Decoupling Principle: A Practical Privacy Framework (2022)
• Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought (2023)