Episodes

Do you realize that you’re not always using your chosen mobile web browser or your network privacy features? Many mobile apps have their own in-app browser that can gather your data and even inject ads and trackers into any web links you click. I’ll explain how this works and what you can do about it. In the news: 23andMe bankruptcy ombudsman argues for user consent to data; Meta AI app privacy nightmare; Amazon, Roku sharing users for ads; WhatsApp launches in-app ads; healthcare sites are sha...

On January 12th, 2025, the ShmooCon hacker conference held it’s 20th and final gathering. I was lucky enough to be able to not only attend the final show but also to interview the founders, Heidi and Bruce Potter. We talk about how it all got started, what made this hacker con so special and beloved, and hear some hilarious stories from the past twenty years of hacker shenanigans in Washington D.C. Interview Notes ShmooCon: https://www.shmoocon.org/ ShmooCon 2025 sessions: https://www.youtube....

Artificial Intelligence is taking over. But I don’t mean that in a Skynet kinda way. It’s simply becoming ubiquitous because companies are insisting on inserting the technology into all their products, even if it’s not useful – or not even safe. Unfortunately, the breathless reporting on dangers of AI is also getting way out of hand, including stories of AI systems ‘blackmailing’ their designers. Today I’ll try to bring us back to reality a bit. Also in the news: Billions of session login cooki...

Debbie Reynolds (aka, The Data Diva) has been working in the privacy realm for many years, as a privacy consultant, speaker, advisor and podcaster. She and I have been running in the same circles on LinkedIn for a while now, and we finally decided it was time to be a guest on each other’s shows. Today Debbie and I will discuss the dangers of privacy in the realm of IoT devices (including her contributions on the US Department of Commerce’s IoT Advisory Board), vehicles, and AI. I’ll ask about he...

Tracking our faces and whereabouts is getting out of control. It’s a mass surveillance infrastructure that keeps growing in Borg-like fashion. Facial recognition and license plate readers are proliferating at a stupefying pace and companies like Flock are consolidating the collected data and packaging it up for sale to law enforcement agencies. Even if no human in these agencies were to abuse this data, it’s creating an irresistible target for scheming hackers and nation states keen on espionage...

VPNs were not invented for privacy, despite the name – they were invented for security. Nevertheless, in recent years, they have been touted as privacy tools to thwart rampant and fanatical data gathering. With a regular VPN, this really just means you’re shifting your trust from your internet service provider to your VPN provider. But what if your encrypted data traffic was actually divided between two separate companies? The split trust model is a powerful way to protect your privacy and it’s ...

There are way too many messenger apps today. It’s a sad state of affairs and I don’t see it getting better anytime soon. But the real problem (for me) is that almost all of the popular messenger apps aren’t really that secure and private. Most do not have end-to-end encryption (E2EE) at all or it’s not turned on by default. And frankly even the apps with E2EE are run by companies whose revenue model is based on monetizing your personal data. I’m going to suggest you try Signal. In other news: s...

Almost exactly two years ago, “Five Eyes” intelligence agencies discovered a successful and ongoing cyber attack on critical US infrastructure by a state-sponsored actor based in China. This group, associated with the People’s Liberation Army and known as Volt Typhoon, was tasked with quietly gaining persistent remote access to critical systems including water, power, communications, and transportation systems, as well as ports and government networks. The goal was to deter the US from interferi...

As we learned last week from Zach Edwards, our smartphones have a globally unique mobile ad ID, or MAID, that is automatically associated with everything we do on our phones… unless we take explicit steps to turn this off. Today I’ll tell you how this works and why you should disable this insidious form of tracking. In other news: the FTC warns us about a new type of scam; dating app Raw exposed sensitive user data; a determined reporter documents his efforts to disable all the AI features in h...

Data brokers are out of control. While we think of them gathering data in order to target us with ads, they can actually use the targeted ad system (real-time bidding) to collect vast quantities of personal information. It’s a very shady business and the primary players are trying hard to obfuscate what they’re doing. Thankfully, we have people like my guest, Zach Edwards, whose investigations are ripping the cover off of these unscrupulous practices. Interview Notes Zach Edwards: https://www....

Going through border security today – even just returning to your own country – is not at simple and stress-free as it should be. The likelihood of our digital devices being searched by a border agent has increased in recent years and political sensitivities today can be high. Our devices have access to a ridiculous amount of extremely personal information. How can we protect ourselves? The answers aren’t great, but I’ll give the current best advice from immigration lawyers and civil rights grou...

It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, even with cybersecurity. But defending a business, of any size, against cyber threats today is hard. Like, really hard. Defenders have to succeed every single time; attackers only need to succeed once. And then your company makes the headlines. Today we’ll delve into the world of the “blue team” – the defenders who are charged with protecting your data and the services you depend on – with cyber expert Oz Jones. Along the way, we’ll learn valuable le...

When we collect a lot of personal data, say via the US Census, the goal is to glean important aggregate information and statistics, while somehow preserving the anonymity and privacy of the individual respondents. There’s a rigorous mathematical process for doing this – that’s actually not that hard to understand – called Differential Privacy. I’ll explain how it works. In the news: iOS has a new location privacy setting; Google confirms it’s rolling out AI to Gmail; Windows makes it much harde...

We’ve been installing apps on our smartphones for almost two decades now. The iPhone and Android app stores kicked off in 2008 and we still, to this day, have no real way to know what’s in them. It turns out that most apps are an amalgamation of software libraries and development kits from various third party vendors, so often even the makers of apps don’t fully understand the makeup of their products. Lisa LeVasseur from Internet Safety Labs has worked to build tools to dissect and inspect our ...

Tax time is once again upon us here in the USA, which means that the tax scammers are coming out of the woodwork. Many will claim to be representing the IRS, claiming that there is an urgent need to fix a problem with your return, threatening penalties if you don’t pay them money. Others will simply try to file fake returns in your name, but send the massive false refund checks to themselves. I’ll help you spot and avoid these scams. In other news: Apple’s Passwords app was vulnerable to phishi...

Josh Summers lived in China for many years and learned a lot about privacy and security. Since he left, he’s made it his mission to share this knowledge through his website and YouTube channel called All Things Secured – helping regular, everyday people like you and me to protect our data and devices. Today we’ll talk specifically about improving your security and privacy on iPhones and Android phones, and even some alternatives outside the Apple and Google ecosystems. Interview Notes All Thin...

Google’s Chrome browser is rolling out changes that will hamstring ad blockers – so there’s never been a better time to try a better browser. There are a handful of good options, but I’m going to recommend that you try Firefox with a fantastic ad blocker called uBlock Origin. If you’ve never tried this powerful combination, you won’t believe what you’ve been missing. In other news: the UK scrubs all encryption advice from government sites; Signal’s CEO threatens to leave Sweden over backdoor de...

Today, we travel back in time and back to The L0pht with one of the original founders of L0pht Heavy Industries, Weld Pond (aka Chris Wysopal). We’ll talk about how hacker culture has impacted modern technology, cybersecurity practices and digital rights, while sprinkling in some classic and hilarious stories from hacker history by someone who lived them. Interview Notes Veracode: https://www.veracode.com/ L0pht.com: https://l0pht.com/ L0pht Congressional testimony 1998: https://www.youtube.co...

Not all Privacy Enhancing Technologies are new – but this one is probably new to you. Onion routing was developing in the 1990’s by the US government and is the basis for the Tor Network. Onion routing does one thing very well: it masks your actual IP address. While you can use a VPN for this purpose, onion routing adds a different layer of anonymity – and it’s just a cool technology. Today I’ll explain how it works, how to use it, and the pros and cons of doing so. In other news: Bitly is leve...

Generic security advice is good, but tailored advice is much better. Everyone’s situation is a little different. What are you trying to protect? Who or what are you trying to protect it from? What are the consequences of failure? This is called threat modeling. And thankfully, the wonderful folks at Consumer Reports have a free, easy-to-use Security Planner tool that will help anyone do this assessment and provide custom solutions. My guest today is Yael Grauer, who will help us understand how t...

Privacy is a human right – and you don’t have to justify rights, you just have them. That’s kinda the whole point. But you do need to exercise them and defend them sometimes. It has been leaked that the UK is telling Apple to reveal the encrypted data of every single one of their users to the UK government under the auspices of the Investigatory Powers Act (and its recent controversial Amendment). This would be a privacy and security disaster, and we were not even supposed to know about it. In ...

In the real world, we present different aspects of ourselves in different environments: home, work, family, friends, school, etc. Why can’t we do this in the virtual world, as well? While marketers love to identify us with unique identifiers so they can track us mercilessly, there are tools we can use that will allow us to compartmentalize our digital lives just like we can in the real world. Today we’ll discuss the notion of decentralized identity with Dr. Paul Ashley, CTO of Anonyome Labs who ...

Software plugins allow you to add functionality to existing applications. Web browsers commonly use these extensions to add functionality like shopping helpers, password managers, ad blockers and much, much more. In a way, these add-ons are like “apps” for the browser. Like apps, they can view and manipulate your data. In the browser, they may alter the web page, track pages you visit, and even mine any data you might enter into web forms. Also like apps, plugins can have permissions which you m...

There are way too many data brokers and they have way too much of our data. We’ve talked a lot lately about what you can do to reclaim your privacy and claw back some of that data and today I’m going to give you yet another interesting tool for your privacy toolbox: Permission Slip. This app and the related service, brought to you by Consumer Reports, will work on your behalf to request that these data brokers relinquish your information, or at least suppress the sharing of that data to the exte...