Latest articles on AI, technology, and software development.
Laws in the UK, US, and EU are demanding that websites verify users' ages before showing them certain content. The problem: every practical method of doing this creates a surveillance infrastructure that privacy advocates, security researchers, and civil liberties groups have spent years trying to prevent.
The US health data market is larger, more detailed, and more consequential than most people realize. BetterHelp shared therapy data with Facebook. GoodRx shared prescriptions with ad networks. The 23andMe bankruptcy raised alarms about 15 million DNA profiles. Here's how the industry actually works and what legal protections exist.
WhatsApp adopted the Signal Protocol for end-to-end encryption in 2016. On that specific dimension — message content encryption — the two apps are technically equivalent. The differences that matter are metadata collection, business model, platform architecture, and what each company can and cannot hand to law enforcement. Here's a precise comparison.
Facial recognition systems are operating in airports, stadiums, schools, retail stores, and public streets in dozens of countries. The technology has improved dramatically and deployment has raced ahead of regulation. Here's where your face is being scanned, what the data is used for, and what protections actually exist.
Data brokers legally sell your home address, phone number, family members' names, political affiliation, and location history to anyone with a credit card. Most people don't know they can opt out — and those who do find the process deliberately painful. Here's what they actually sell, how they get it, and what realistically works to reduce your exposure.
Location data brokers collect precise movement histories from hundreds of millions of smartphones and sell them to advertisers, insurers, hedge funds, and government agencies. The data is collected without meaningful informed consent and is nearly impossible to opt out of completely.
Cookie consent banners give users the feeling of control. Browser fingerprinting — the technique that replaced cookies as the dominant tracking mechanism — requires no consent, stores nothing on your device, and is nearly impossible to block without breaking the web.
A $300 billion industry built on your name, location, health inferences, and political beliefs — and most of it is perfectly legal. Here's how it works, who's profiting, and what you can actually do about it.
In 2019, Google announced it would deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome within two years. In October 2025, Google shut down the Privacy Sandbox — the $500M+ initiative meant to replace them — citing low adoption. Cookies still work. Apple's App Tracking Transparency actually did what it promised, cutting iOS tracking by 55 percentage points. The gap between those two outcomes explains everything about where digital advertising privacy stands in 2026.
Mobile advertising identifiers — IDFA on iOS and GAID on Android — were supposed to become privacy tools after Apple and Google's 2021 changes. Data broker market research shows they are still widely traded, just through different channels.
The EU AI Act's high-risk AI system requirements became enforceable on May 2, 2026. Companies that deploy AI in hiring, credit scoring, biometric identification, or critical infrastructure now face specific data governance obligations — not just fairness principles, but documented, auditable processes. Here is what the law actually requires and where most organizations are failing.
Browser fingerprinting builds a persistent identifier from dozens of technical attributes your browser broadcasts by default — screen resolution, font rendering, GPU model, timezone, installed plugins. Deleting cookies does not change any of them. Here is how the technique works and what actually reduces your exposure.