Chat Control is Finally Dead?

Oh, there we go. Hello, everyone. We got a lot of stories for you today. Chat control, one point O has been defeated. DuckDuckGo is building their own web index. Vala wants to make payments on Android that would work on custom ROMs. So all of that and other news is coming up next. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to This Week in Privacy, our weekly series where we discuss the latest updates with what we're working on within the Privacy Guides community and this week's latest top stories in the data privacy and cybersecurity space. I am Nate, and with me this week live and in the same room is our executive director, Jonah. How was travel? It was a good trip. Not too much to complain about. I didn't have to travel quite as long as you did. It was still okay, though. I've had much worse.

So... All right.

Yeah, with that, we're just going to jump right into our main stories this week. And our first story... Oh, excuse me here. This is acting up a little bit. Yeah, our first story this week is about chat control. This is good news. We don't typically get a lot of good news in the privacy space. I mean, I hate to say it, but we do get good news sometimes. And this is a good one. Chat control one point O has... been heavily, heavily, heavily reigned in.

So for those of you who may not be aware, chat control, there's two versions of chat control. Well, let me start by saying that chat control is basically the initiative in Europe to get companies to scan all communications and messaging.

and um chat control one point oh is a voluntary version and uh companies can choose to comply or not comply and it basically provided them with legal protection if they did choose to comply kind of a whole uh kind of like what section thirty two thirty is supposed to do here in the us where like if you're acting in good faith we're not gonna you know get too crazy with with suing you if something goes wrong um two point oh is the other one that would require client side scanning,

even for things like Signal and all these encrypted messengers. But yeah, but one point it was obviously still not great, right? Because, you know, this this blog post here comes from Patrick Breyer, who is an MP for the Pirate Party, which I think is actually the official name, which is pretty crazy. But yeah, and he's he's long been a big, a big proponent of of privacy in general in Europe. He's definitely been pushing for a lot of good privacy initiatives.

And with this With this Chat Control, the Pirate Party put forward Amendment Five. Sorry, I know I'm going a little out of order here. Chat Control is one of those things that has to be renewed every so often, and it's actually up for renewal here in April. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like they were going to stop it entirely, but at least they were able to get in this Amendment Five here, which basically says, okay, it's still voluntary, it's still scanning.

but it has to be limited specifically to individual users or groups of users suspected by a competent judicial authority of being linked to child sexual abuse. So basically, like the headline here says, they've ended the untargeted mass scanning of private chats, and they've at least reined it in to be like, it has to be people that you think are potentially guilty of this specific crime.

um so yeah i mean those are kind of the facts of of this story um it's huge news i mean the deadline for chat control one point oh uh was coming up pretty quick it was coming up in april and april sixth i think they said yeah a lot of countries in the eu were definitely planning on renewing it um which would have enabled the current state of affairs to continue on which isn't ideal because it provides these companies a you know, a legitimate use for or a legitimate

reason to scan all of this data for their customers, as long as they're saying they're doing it for the purposes defined in check control one point. Oh, they can kind of do whatever they want scanning wise with The data of Europeans and now, even though. You know, it'll still be around getting this amendment in that restricts it to. Just like court or ordered situations, I think is. A huge benefit for sure. And again, even though this version of chat control will.

pretty much inevitably be renewed. It's in this form still a voluntary system. So something like signal is not going to be affected by this anything with end to end encryption isn't going to be affected. It'll mainly be something that like, probably big tech companies, Google, Facebook are going to use to scan messages, which they were certainly doing already. So it's not great.

Ideally, you know, all of these services would have more privacy by default, but at least you can still switch these private alternatives, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and it's really interesting. I know this isn't necessarily relevant per se, but this article has some really good statistics here that I thought were really interesting. Like they say here that there was overload of junk data. Forty-eight percent of the disclosed chats are false positives and criminally irrelevant.

They said in Germany, forty percent of investigations already target minors who thoughtlessly share images rather than organized predators. So like here in the US, for example, the age of consent is like eighteen. And so if a seventeen year old is dating a seventeen year old and sends an image to them, that is technically CSAM.

But it's also one of those things where most people are just kind of like, yeah, okay, maybe they shouldn't be doing that, but also we shouldn't treat them like child predators. And so he just kind of points out all the reasons that this stuff is just completely insane. And yeah, it's definitely unfortunate that the whole thing just didn't get thrown out entirely, but it is really cool to see it get reined in for sure. And that... I don't know.

Do you think this has any implications for Chat Control? That is what I was just about to ask you. No, I do think there is different ways that they could go about this. This has obviously been around for quite a while and I think they have been using this as an excuse for like, this has been around for years and now we want to expand on these requirements. And so certainly it's not great because it kind of gives them an excuse to do all of this.

At the same time, I think that this version right here and the proposed to point out version that they continually try to push across the finish line. They are pretty different. And I don't necessarily know that this will lead into that. But it's always a slippery slope. I think we're always we're always right on the edge of maybe these privacy protections no longer working.

So even though I don't think this is going to be a huge deal just because it has been around a while and this is an even better form of it. And so we're kind of moving in the right direction. I do think when more chat control discussions come up, like they did last year, for example, we all need to stay vigilant about that and continue posting about that and continue contacting representatives at that time.

So in the future, we'll continue to talk about chat control if that's coming up and stuff, but...

But yeah, I think before we move on to our next story, we should probably address a bit more about where we are this week. So Nate and I, as we talked about on last week's show, we are here in Austin, Texas. EFF Austin is putting on an event that's actually starting in a couple hours here in this space. So this will be... build up and there will be speakers going on here. There's going to be music outside. It's going to be fun. All of this is going on during South by Southwest.

Kind of an unofficial party together by EFF. So I don't know if any of you watching are in Austin, Texas and want to hop over in the next two hours, but you certainly can. Otherwise, Nate, do you have anything else you want to share about this event?

Yeah, I've got a Yeah, so our EFF Austin's president, Kevin Welch, he said that we're fighting the enshitification of South by Southwest and providing an event in the spirit of the original South by Southwest Interactive that Hugh Forrest, who is one of the co-founders of South by Southwest Interactive and is actually one of our keynote speakers here tonight, he said that Hugh Forrest built over the years and we're providing a space of hope, highlighting people fighting against and

shitification of tech and bad tech laws, people who are building cool things with tech and pushing back on bad policy. So, yeah, I know we have viewers all over the country, and all over the world, really. But, yeah, if you happen to be in the Austin area and you're free tonight, we'll be here. Well, we'll be here all night in the sense of the event. It goes until ten, I think, local time. So if you happen to be in the area, definitely come say hi. And, you know, if not, just, Keep an eye out.

I think we're going to try to share some of the stuff that we learned here tonight, hopefully.

Yeah. In the meantime, do you want to talk to us about this next story about what's going on with removing custom ROM hurdles? Yeah. So this headline is, Let's see if it would load. Paying without Google, new consortium wants to remove custom ROM hurdles.

So basically, a new coalition consisting of the groups behind EOS, IOD, Apostrophe, and Vala are pushing for unified attestation, which is a Google-free alternative to Google Play integrity, which we've talked about a bit on the show and, of course, on the Privacy Guides forum in the past.

which if they can do this it would also potentially open the door to google free nfc payment options on android which would be great um this has long been i think a pain point for many custom os users and this plan proposal would be released under an open source license apache I think that this could be huge because we have certainly not only when it comes to like tap to pay apps but also just banking apps in general.

I think that we've seen and this comes up a lot in like Graphene OS discussions.

A lot of banking apps are relying on this Google Play API to determine like whether your phone is secure and obviously That only works on play certified devices and you have to have all of this invasive background system apps running and You have to give a lot of access to Google for them to give you the okay, okay to access your your own financial information, right, so Yeah, I think this could be a really great thing, if they can get this across the finish line, I think that it's going to be a

challenge for sure to get people to adopt this technology, especially if they can't get it into Android first party. Because we've seen, like Graphene OS we'll talk about on their website, there is a way to run some sort of attestations that's just built into Android. And they support that from a hardware perspective. And I'm not sure exactly how this is going to go. further than that existing option that Graphene OS has.

But I think the fact that all of these banking apps are not adopting that means that, or not adopting Graphene OS's alternative option right now means that there's some hurdle that we still have to overcome when it comes to this. So hopefully more of these custom ROM developers banding together can get us over the finish line to make this more widespread. But yeah, I don't know. We'll see. That's all I can say. Did you have any thoughts on this story? Not too much more.

Totally irrelevant, but I just want to point out real quick, I just noticed at the bottom of this page, there is the Share on Mastodon button. Oh, really? Yeah, which just came out a couple weeks ago. There's now like an official Share on Mastodon. And this is a pretty big publication. I don't know how it's pronounced, but like heist.de. It's a German publication. I see them pop up a lot. So that's really cool. That is cool.

I will say on our own news articles on our site, we added that button Oh, yeah. We had that, like, same day. You were on that. So if you want to check it out, you can do that. But, yeah, I hope to see other publications about that. Yeah. But, yeah, in regards to the actual story, I agree.

It's especially... especially with the ROMs where you can't lock the bootloader, like EOS and Lineage, or maybe with EOE you can, but like with Lineage, for example, I know a lot of these banking apps don't run at all, which it's already frustrating enough that when you move to one of these custom ROMs, you can't use like Google Pay or anything anymore, which is super frustrating because I've actually...

I'm not going to lie, ever since Privacy.com rolled out their mobile pay cards, I've been using Apple Pay like crazy. Just because I have an iPhone, it doesn't have a SIM card in it or anything. But I loaded a privacy card in there and I'm like, cool, now I don't have to use a debit card. And it's super, super convenient and it's super nifty. But there's nothing like that on a custom phone, a custom Google, or you know what I'm trying to say, a custom operating system.

Yeah. And I know some banks, from what I'm told, some banks, if they offer like, oh, in their app, they have their own little payment. You can use that. But my bank is not one of them. So I can't do that. And it's just a real bummer. So hopefully this is something that will solve this issue. And maybe we could start to see more options in general. Because it is crazy. And our official recommendation is still Graphene OS. It's very secure. It's very private.

But... at the end of the day, it's your phone. And if you know the risks and if you have a reason and it's your, you fits your threat model and you want to go with something else, like it's your phone, you can do that. And you should still have the ability to use, uh, you know, your banking at, like you said, like, Oh, you can't even access your financial information, which is insane because it's your bank. It's your account. It's your phone. Yeah, exactly.

But it's like, Oh, because you don't have this proprietary code or whatever running. So yeah, that's, I'm really glad to see this coming around. And I really hope that, um, that it will, uh, It will work out and become a thing. Yeah, Mr. Rabbit here said, sounds amazing to finally have some nice payment system on Graphene OS. So yeah, pretty cool stuff. Great. Where are we?

I think we should probably talk about some site updates from Privacy Guides. So before we dive into our next topic, DuckDuckGo, let's give some quick updates about what we've been working at at Privacy Guides this week. And for those of you who are new to the show, who don't know, Privacy Guides is a nonprofit which researches and shares privacy-related information.

And we facilitate a community on our forum and on Matrix where people can ask questions, and get advice about staying private online and preserving their digital rights. So Nate has, as always, been working very hard on the video side of things, so do you want to give us some updates on how that's going? Sure. Me and Jordan both, it's not all me, it's team effort, but speaking of that, our private messaging video is now available for Early Access members.

So if you are a member on YouTube, which actually I do want to shout out, somebody did join earlier today. Joey Wardock became a member on YouTube. We really appreciate that. Thanks for joining. And we also, if you join on our forum, then you can get early access to videos as well. So, yeah, any one of those people can now go ahead and view that right now. And Jonah also rushed out in the sense of quick turnaround.

Jonah put out a video about Proton's kill switch on Apple devices and how that is a little bit problematic. And I think we're going to talk about that a little more later in the show as well. But that is available publicly for everyone who wants to go see it. I'm sure probably some of you have seen that video. It definitely got some attention and we made some changes to our site regarding this. So we updated our criteria around VPN kill switches and we added a warning for Proton.

Basically the gist of the video was that the kill switch wasn't working on Mac OS when you switch between servers. So there's a brief period of time where your IP could be exposed and Proton wasn't very clear about that. So the day after we published that video, Proton responded on our form with a lot of details and they also confirmed that they were updating their documentation.

So now it's very clear that this can happen both in their documentation for the kill switch right now and in the upcoming update of their ProtonVPN app on macOS. It'll have a bolded warning basically when you turn on the kill switch telling you that this is happening. And they also committed to fixing this problem. Hopefully this year they said, I think they said Spring or summer? I know they said summer. Spring and summer roadmap, I think. Yeah, that's what I remember.

So hopefully it doesn't take too long for them to do that, but obviously it'll be a bit of work, I think. There's two things going on here. It's tricky because Apple certainly doesn't make it easy to make a kill switch in the first place, and they're kind of dealing within the constraints of that. But also, I think the bigger issue that we had was just how their documentation wasn't clear so that people who are on Mac OS are affected and they might not even know.

Whereas now at least you know and you can plan accordingly. Other stuff on the site, as usual, Freya has been putting out a lot of news articles lately at privacyguides.org slash news. So there's been more news briefs about AI agent threats, some new corona malware, and a lot more. So if you want to visit privacyguides.org slash news, that is a great way to keep up with updates in this space because we try to keep you and informed on privacy and security.

All of the work that we do here is made possible by our supporters. You can sign up for a membership or you can donate at privacyguides.org slash donate or you can pick up some swag at shop.privacyguides.org.

I think that's all for updates. Let's talk about DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo. Okay. No, this is actually pretty interesting stuff, kind of complicated stuff in my opinion. So this comes from their sub stack, which I did not know they have. I think they have a blog and a sub stack.

um but this is uh this is actually a pretty short video it's only about thirteen minutes if you all want to go watch it on your own time but um it's uh it says why duck.go is building its own web search index and actually if you don't even want to watch the video they do have the uh the transcript down here but it says it was like um unedited probably automatically generated so uh personally i found it a little bit hard to follow i ended up just watching the video but um basically yeah

like the the title says duck.go is building their own web search index um The why is kind of confusing in my opinion. It seems to be motivated by AI. It's something about wanting to like, I think they're trying to like have more control over the training data for their AI summaries and stuff like that. Which is a really weird reason, in my opinion.

But I will admit, one of my concerns with DuckDuckGo has long been, and this has just been kind of a concern of mine in general in the privacy space, which is that a lot of these search engines that we rely on, like DuckDuckGo and Startpage, they're not really their own search engines.

they're meta search engines they're basically a proxy for like Google or Bing or somebody else and that really puts them at the mercy of those companies like DuckDuckGo caught a lot of slack a few years ago for censoring things and some of it I mean this has happened a couple times so I'm not talking about every single instance this has happened but in some of these cases it's not that they were censoring it it's that Bing was censoring it and since Bing is their

primary search engine they censored it as a result and Yeah, it's just really... it's, it's not a good position to be in. And so, um, I'm a really big fan personally of like brave search, but I understand brave is a very controversial company. Uh, Mojica I think is another like independent one, but, um, I know their UI is not always great.

So it's just the point being is that it's, it's really good to see more of these, these search engines kind of like trying to break out on their own and create, even if I don't think AI is a good reason to do it, you know, it's kind of one of those, like, don't know how we got here, but I'm glad we're here kind of thing.

So I'm really happy to see them, uh, um branching out on their own i think my big question about this story is do you know whether um they're gonna take an approach kind of like what brave search did where at least initially they were kind of like doing a hybrid approach where it was still based on google and bing i wonder because duck ducko has worked with thing for a long time yeah and they do say i saw in this video that they've been working on this like indexing on their own for for

a few years now so yeah I saw that too it's been it's been in the works apparently for quite a while yeah I don't know I don't know if you saw or if they said in this video whether it's going to be a hybrid approach like that or not. I do think it was interesting at the end of this video, they said if you have questions, you can reach out to them. They might try to address more of this in the future, so keeping up with these updates will definitely be something we want to do. Yeah, for sure.

I am actually, my RSS feed is subscribed to their blog, so hopefully I will see more. I don't know why they didn't put this on their blog, but yeah, no, they didn't specifically address that, but I noticed that too. They just kind of casually slipped that in there, like, yeah, we've been working on this for a couple years, and I'm like... Okay, cool. Which I get it. You know, in...

I'm a really big Nine Inch Nails fan and Trent Reznor over the years has been involved in like so many other projects and bands. And he said in an interview one time, he's like, yeah, we, we kind of, cause I'm kind of getting the lore here, but he was supposed to be in this band called tapeworm. That was like him. And I think some of the guys from tool and just like all these like really, really big bands, but it never materialized. Nothing ever came out of it.

And so he straight up said in interviews, he's like, I learned from that incident to just keep my mouth shut. because so many people were disappointed that nothing ever came out of tapeworm. So I, I totally understand their whole, like, let's just keep this on the download until we're ready. But yeah, it's, it's surprising. Like when, you know, like Beyonce is just like, here's a whole album. It's like, Whoa, what?

So yeah, that, that really came out of nowhere, but I think they probably will do the whole hybrid thing for now. Um, but I will be interested to see, it would be cool if they do eventually, um, go full in on their own. Like, Brave is kind of like, ninety percent Brave at this point. Yeah. So... Jordan said in the comments that they've found Brave's custom search engine has been not super great for people outside the US, so that could be something to consider. I didn't know that.

Thank you for the perspective. Yeah, we'll have to look more into that, but... Because I know DuckDuckGo right now, they... And sometimes this causes problems, but they do, like, have that country selector where you can see, like, country-specific search results. DuckDuckGo is... I've been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine for a while, but it is kind of hit or miss for me, especially with certain topics, unfortunately.

Some things that really... is dialed in on and can do super well, but I feel like it's a lot of keyword-based searches rather than, I don't know, I have to look up a lot of more technical stuff a lot of the time, and just trying to find out the answer to a question can be challenging if I don't know exactly what to look up, which some other search engines are better at. But yeah, it'll be cool. iLook.gov, so it's exciting stuff. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, it's a win regardless whether you're a DuckDuckGo user or not, because they are probably the most popular search engine outside of Google and Bing. And then I did want to mention here, the four, two, what is that? Two, two, four said Brave and Kagi are the only exceptions I can think of when we were talking about, or when I was talking about how a lot of them are meta search engines. We don't officially recommend Kagi. I don't know why.

Maybe we've just never looked at it or anything, but I have heard really good things about it. And About a month ago, Cory Doctorow gave an amazing interview on the Jordan Harbinger show, and he talked about Kagi a little bit. That's been discussed on our forum for a while.

I think one of the big things, at least at the time, was kind of a feeling amongst a lot of people that this sort of stuff should be available for free because it's such an important thing for like a lot of people to switch over. And so like kind of for the same reason we have like, you know, like a web browser has to be free. It's kind of an access to information thing, which is challenging.

But at the same time, I know Kagi has been growing and popular so much and a lot of people seem to like it. So it's probably time to take another. look at that. I think they do have the first hundred searches are free or something, which if you don't do a lot of searches, that's probably pretty good. But I know some days I do a lot of searching too. Some days that would probably work for me, but then other days I would run into that real quick.

How many searches do you all think you do in a month? I'm curious. I feel like a hundred searches would be quite difficult for me to work within. It depends on the day. If I'm researching for a video, I'll blow through that in like an hour. Yeah, so there is a thread open on our forum, like with most tools. I think if anyone has any opinions they want to share, definitely let us know, because we should definitely take a look at it again.

Google? I think that's everything for DuckDuckGo. In a minute, we're going to start taking viewer questions.

So if you've been holding on to any questions about anything that we've talked about or what's going on here or anything else that you've seen in the community this week, you can go ahead and start leaving them either on the forum thread for this show or you can send them in the chat for this live stream um pretty much no matter what platform you're on we get all of that combined into one feed here so we should be able to catch any comments you send in um but for now

let's check in on the community forum there's always a lot of activity on the forum of course but uh here's a few of the week's most interesting discussions

of course The remove Proton VPN discussion was quite a big one and quite lengthy. And that was eventually split off into a couple different threads. But basically, this thread talked about a lot of issues that people had with Proton, especially that issue on macOS. But there's also an open thread on some, I'd say, peculiarities with their Linux kill switch. And then the big question of like, I think Proton has been aware of the Mac OS issue at least for quite a while.

Well, actually, they've been aware of both of those issues for a while, but I don't think they weren't explicitly saying the wrong thing about the Linux situation. Whereas on Mac OS, they were pretty clear in their documentation that switching servers, the regular kill switch should protect you, and it doesn't because of Apple limitations. So I don't know if you are able to pull up, not this thread, but their reply. I think it was in this Proton's misleading marketing thread.

Was there a second reply to us that I think would be good to pull up? Give me just a minute to find that one. Here we go. Do you want me to put it on screen? Yeah, I think so. Okay, let me find it real quick. It's post number forty-eight, so I'll just scroll down quite a bit. Yeah, give me a second. If you have the sidebar pulled up. Because they gave one response, which was very timely, and they did commit to fixing a lot of these issues.

And they updated that documentation thread that I showed in the video right away. So that was good on them, but I think their initial response still left a lot of questions. So they left another response, which is this one, actually, with this picture. I mean, that was the original one that you're showing now, if that's on the screen. Okay, here we go. Yeah, the original one was the one I showed. Yeah. So this is the second reply where they showed exactly what they updated.

And they showed a screenshot of the next update that I talked about. So maybe you can make that screenshot bigger. I don't know. But they basically say, in the client itself, your IP may be briefly visible when switching servers. And they include a link to their updated documentation. When that update is coming out, I don't know. But since it's coming out in the next update, they already have screenshots of it. I'd imagine it should be pretty soon. So I'm not too worried about that.

But I'm glad that they fixed a lot of that stuff. They also said that they're working on a deeper fix. It's already in progress. In their post, they said that we've been rebuilding our network stack with a native WireGuard implementation developed in-house that includes a native kill switch, maintaining the tunnel through server switches. And like they said in the other post, the timeline for the fix is within the first half of our spring-summer roadmap cycle.

So if they are able to get that done in the schedule that they're providing, I think that that would be great. But yeah, that was kind of the updates on all of that. I think their response is probably as good as you could probably reasonably expect given the situation. I'm glad that it was quick, although it took us making a video about it for them to make these changes instead of acting on the various reports. I think they said in one of these posts that Not a lot of people are on Mac OS.

Yeah, I saw that post. There wasn't a very clear demonstration of this problem compared to what I did in the video where I showed it. I think there were a lot of reports, but I didn't find any major reports or reports that had gotten a lot of attention or upvotes or anything on their subreddit. But certainly the reports that there were that I found and that other people in our community found They were responded to by Proton support team.

There was also that remove Proton VPN thread on our forum that was started in December. And I know Proton is somewhat active in Proton related threats on our forum. Obviously, they replied to us on our forum. So that thread did have a lot of attention. And I feel like It's strange and probably not great, in my opinion, that nobody in their support team seemed to have escalated this problem or been like, hey, can we have an engineer at least look into this?

Because I think if they had, it's an extremely easy problem to reproduce. And you can do it on pretty much any Mac configuration. So yeah. A bit disappointing. I think that they acknowledge that in their reply to us. They basically said they don't have a satisfying answer to that question. So they can't really justify it or anything. But yeah, there certainly was a gap.

I hope, I guess the most we can hope for in regards to that is just that they do better in the future about issues like this and try to address them more quickly. But yeah, all of these discussions on Proton, I wouldn't consider them fully resolved. They're still ongoing in our community. It's tricky. So it's tricky because I feel like a lot of the problems that we've seen with ProtonVPN in particular is stuff on their client side, their software isn't great.

But the service that they provide, which is the main thing for a VPN, it's quality. And they have a free option, which is nice for people. And they have a wide server selection. And all of that stuff on the service server operator side of things is good. And so it's hard to say we shouldn't recommend ProtonVPN at all.

But if you're offering a client like this with your VPN service, I do think that there needs to be some level of quality control there and certainly more accurate documentation on all of that. So I'm glad they updated it. But yeah, like I said, ongoing. If anyone has ProtonVPN opinions, feel free to share them on our forum. In any of these discussions, there's just a lot going on with them. But that's kind of the update for now. We'll see what their follow through is like.

Yeah, it was a really good statement. I was really impressed with it, especially just the things like you said, why this wasn't surfaced more clearly to users sooner. We don't have a satisfying answer, just taking accountability like that. I think there are some very valid reasons complaints with Proton. Their Linux support is always very slow and lagging. Proton VPN on Linux is not a great experience. But it's like you said, they do provide.

They're the only ones left that still do port forwarding, which is kind of a niche thing. But they are the only ones that have a free tier. They have a huge server selection, like you said. So they do have a lot of redeeming qualities. It's just, yeah. You know, it occurs to me, since they're notorious for not having feature parity between apps, why didn't they just remove the kill switch on the Mac app entirely? Honestly. That would have been such an easy fix.

And nobody would have been shocked. It's just like, oh, there's Proton not having this feature on Mac. For all the trash I talk, though. But yeah, no. So it's good to see them responding to this. It is unfortunate that it kind of took you having to make a video and privacy guides having to call them out.

It's really unfortunate that it's personal rant here, but it's frustrating that sometimes privacy companies behave just like big tech companies where Signal had this thing where the private keys were being stored unencrypted on Windows. And they made a very valid argument when they're like, well, if your machine is compromised, there's nothing we can do about that. But it's like, yes, But also, the fix is so easy. Why wouldn't you just roll it out?

And it basically had to blow up into a whole thing before they finally did it. And it's just really frustrating when we have to see companies shamed into acting like this. And it's like, you're supposed to be better than this. We just got a comment from Mr. Rabbit here. Port forwarding is very niche. And that is true, but I will say, I think... BitTorrent in particular is a good reason that you would want to have port forwarding.

And there's a lot of very legitimate reasons you would want to use torrenting. I mean, even mundane reasons like downloading Linux, you can alleviate bandwidth from those servers. In my case, I seed a lot of Qwix's libraries, so pretty much anything you can download for Qwix to have offline, like Wikipedia or any of the other stuff in their library, I pretty much have all of those hosted, and I seed all of them on BitTorrent. And the thing with torrents is...

Even if you're downloading things that are perfectly legal, you might not necessarily want everyone to know what you're downloading. And there are certainly websites out there where you can enter an IP address, and they'll show you everything that's been downloaded on that IP address. And so that's certainly a privacy concern. And I think that port forwarding has a use case.

So just to go ahead and put it out there, the four two two four said VPNs on iOS also have a big problem with leaking traffic to this day. Apple has some big room for improvement on all platforms. That's why IVP and kill switches on iOS don't do anything. That is true. If you are an iOS user, you should know. And I think Proton has even reported this to Apple in the past. that kill switches on iOS are practically useless. And Apple, especially on iOS, has really hamstrung them.

As far as I know, there's really no way around that, unfortunately. And the thing is with Proton, their iOS implementation and their macOS implementation is pretty much identical. These exist in the same source code repository on GitHub, where the app that they release on both platforms is the same. And that certainly makes development easier. It means that they're not taking advantage of all the tools that are available on macOS that aren't on iOS, which is a whole argument that's going on now.

People are pretty split between whether they should be going above and beyond because they're on macOS or whether they should be doing it according to what Apple tells developers to do.

There's certainly good arguments for both sides, but if you're only using Apple's Approved api's to like create network tunnels like this on mac os there are exactly the same problems as there are on ios and so like this point about ios vpn apps leaking traffic like that totally applies to mac os apps and it just happens that ivpn and mullved they um implement, I would say, a bit of a hackier solution to kind of plug all those gaps, basically.

So their kill switch on macOS is certainly much better than Proton. And if you really need this kill switch functionality, especially if you switch servers a lot, it's probably worth switching to one of those providers if you're on macOS. But I would say that the biggest problem with the whole ProtonVPN thing wasn't whether their kill switch worked or not, because they are working within Apple's limitations in this case. I think the big problem was just that it was very not clear.

In fact, they said the opposite. They said it would work when you're switching servers, and it... And it didn't. And I think that people definitely could have been affected by that. And so that was the main thing. It was more of a documentation issue for me. And I'm glad that they at least fixed that. And I'm also happy that they are exploring ways to improve the kill switch in general. That is a longer term fix, but it'll still be good to see. And I'm glad they did both.

I got one more before we move on from Jordan here. And this might be kind of speculation, but it says, were there any changes that will be made to the website after the response? Where are we at with that? Yeah, so that's a good question. We made a few changes already. Basically, right now, and this is more of a temporary thing, but we are making it clear that this specific kill switch criteria is only going to...

We're only going to really consider it on the operating systems that we recommend because, like we just said, it's very hard to do this properly on Apple platforms in the first place. And we would probably argue that if you are this concerned about privacy, it's It's usually good to explore alternatives to Apple and certainly Windows.

And so we're really focused on making sure these kill switches work on recommended Android ROMs like Graphene OS and also all of the Linux distros we recommend versus every single platform under the sun.

that is just kind of temporary for now because it is an open question as to what we should actually do about all of this we'll probably expand this um to go back to including all operating systems but we might uh say that using the os provided kill switch is acceptable um regardless of whether that kill switch is good like on apple's operating system, it's not good. But that's more of a platform issue with macOS that I think macOS users need to be aware of.

But as long as you're not lying about how your kill switch works, we might find that acceptable. But there are certainly some arguments that they should be going above and beyond and using undocumented or unsupported features if they make the kill switch better, like Mulvet and IVPN currently do. And so if you want to chime in on that discussion, you can join in on the forum. I don't know.

what direction we'll go in yet, but I think a lot of people right now are leaning towards the first approach where ProtonVPN stays on the site because, like I said earlier, It's not only a matter of evaluating these clients, but we're also looking at the server side of things. And I think that ProtonVPN does a lot of things well, even if we're not super happy with some of the stuff going on with their clients.

And especially because it's a free alternative for a lot of people, or a budget alternative, especially if you already have Proton Unlimited. Expanding access to using a VPN at all is super important. And there aren't really any free VPN providers that come to mind that could really replace Proton in this space. So I think that's a really good reason to keep them on the site. Yeah, we'll see how that goes. Certainly, we'll add more warnings about this.

Proton added those warnings to their documentation, but we added warnings in the latest site update as well. So that should be clear to people about what's going on on macOS. And we can make those warnings stronger, or we can change our criteria accordingly. But yeah, no subplans. But that's where we're at now. At the very least, for the time being, it should be clear. what's going on on macOS so that people are aware.

Yeah, over on the new oil, I do recommend a handful of free VPNs like RiseUp and Calix. But I even mentioned in the notes that I'm like, yeah, they're severely limited in features compared to what you're going to get on something like even Proton's free plan. It's just so hard to beat. There's certainly a difference between like these nonprofit projects and like a commercial endeavor, right? And that's what I mentioned.

I'm like, these are great if you absolutely need a VPN for something and you absolutely can't afford it, but you're going to take a real feature hit. as a result. In terms of even the number of servers available. You can't even pick the servers. It just connects you to the fastest, closest one. Those tools to me are more anti-censorship tools.

They're super useful for people who can't access the internet normally or need... one of these less popular VPNs that aren't like probably blocked by less services, honestly, but might be slower, definitely don't have all the features. Whereas there's a lot of VPN use cases that don't require or like that aren't censorship circumvention. And so for all of that stuff, ProtonVPN usually makes more sense.

And not to like beat a dead horse, but what you were saying about like, you know, they're, they're not perfect, but they still provide a valuable service. I mean, that's, I think that's true of anything on, in the privacy space. Like there is no perfect service and you know, everything has pros and cons. And so, yeah. It's tough. But I think that will take us into our Q&A, if I understand correctly. Yes, it is time. All right, so now we're going to take some viewer questions.

This chair moves, and it throws me off every time I scoot forward. Yeah, these are cool chairs.

I like them. Okay, so we'll start with questions on our forum from our paying members, and you can become a member again by going to privacyguides.org and clicking the red heart icon in the top right corner of the page. So I don't know if we had any member questions. No, we didn't have any member questions, but we did have some questions on the forum this week. So let's see here. We had a note about chat control. I think there was a question here. No. Okay, but we did have this question here.

What are your thoughts on piracy when it comes to trying to stay private whilst gaming? I think I mean privacy. What are your thoughts on privacy when it comes to trying to stay private while gaming? Yeah, I'll read this before I answer that. No, no. I think they're asking if piracy is acceptable to avoid these. Got you. Yeah, okay. Because they mentioned that most storefronts download your data in the same way as other sites, or collect your data, excuse me.

specifically your interest while browsing the store and your play time of owned games. You say, I haven't found a store that allows you to make accounts relatively anonymously and pay with something like Monero. GOG seems to be the best option when it comes to not having your gameplay tracked because they do sell DRM-free games, but you still need to use their storefront. And then their library is a lot smaller compared to like Steam, for example.

A lot of publishers don't want to release DRM-free files or they have exclusivity deals. So it seems the only way to play games privately, similar to other media shows, is to get them illegitimately. Well, I will say that... Yeah, first off, Jordan reminded me, thank you here, that Fria did, I think last week or the week before, write an article about how to game privately. Not piracy.

Yeah. That's a separate topic, but if you are a gamer and you want to learn about private gaming, there is a good article about that, yeah. Yeah, so I would check that out for sure. I will say that me personally, this is my personal view, and I'm going to end up defending this one for weeks like last time I said this. I... I gotta be honest. I think piracy is theft. And I think all the arguments I hear... Like, I hear you. It is messed up that you don't actually own it, right?

Like, you buy a thing and you get a license. And there's been so many stories about, like, Amazon pulled, ironically, NineteenEightyFour out of people's libraries because of a licensing dispute. But at the end of the day, when we're talking about games, games are a luxury. And... At the end of the day, and this is another argument people make, that they're like, oh, but the studio gets most of the money, but you're still not paying for it.

So my thing is, and here's my thing, find a way to support the maker. If it's an indie game, find some way to pay them and support them and let them know that you want more of these games. You just want them on a more privacy-respecting platform or something like that. Yeah. The best example I can come up with is music, personally. And I say this as a musician. If you're going to pirate my music, the least you can do is go to a show, go to the merch store.

Do something to still show that you appreciate it and you are trying to support them. So that is my personal opinion. I'm also not going to endorse crimes on a recording. I'm just going to say that. So I don't think piracy is the way to go. I think you make really valid points. It would be really cool to see a game store that allows you to pay with crypto, especially something like Monero, or doesn't track everything you do. I don't know of any.

I don't know how hard it would be to make some kind of a storefront like that. But... I will say in my personal opinion, I think the only exception is probably like games that are no longer in print. Like there's an old Jurassic Park game that I love playing where it's like you basically build your own Jurassic Park. That thing has been gone for years. So like, I don't think anyone's going to sell it to you. Yeah, exactly.

And like you can find them used on eBay, but they're like a hundred bucks a copy. And I'm like, okay, I think maybe we'll visit the high fees for this one. That's definitely not going to the developer. For sure. So that's personally my opinion is the main issue I take with piracy is that one way or another, you're still not showing support for the product itself. And I think as long as you can find a way to do that, you know, yeah, that's my two cents.

Yeah. Yeah, retro games is definitely different, because that's more of an archival thing. To me, I think that it's morally correct to preserve art, actually. But all of this other like piracy of modern games, it's like cyberpunk, certainly an ethical question. And yeah, I totally agree.

I think mean ironically like gabe newell had that quote about how piracy is a service problem um because people wouldn't pirate games if like it was super convenient to just buy them because i think people really like that convenience we saw that you know when steam and netflix were first coming out and they were competitors to like the mainstream platforms it was like oh yeah it's super easy to on netflix subscribe and see all the movies they're on steam you can just quickly buy a

game i was gonna say honestly like music streaming Made me stop pirating music. Music is definitely the best example. I think a lot of people could learn at least this lesson from the music industry because almost nobody really pirates music these days because it's so affordable and easy to stream on pretty much any platform. It's nice that there aren't really a lot of exclusive songs that are stuck on certain platforms that you have to switch between. It's all just kind of a universal system.

I haven't seen that a lot lately. I remember some big... headline ones years ago, but I don't know what the current status is. But it's certainly not like a Netflix versus Hulu situation where they're completely different now and you have to buy a million streaming services. I think that's why people are going back to piracy.

In this case, it's not really a pricing concern because obviously it's still very convenient and cheap to just buy games on Steam, for example, but the privacy concern is real and Kind of similarly to all those pricing concerns, I think that a big way to avoid piracy would be to encourage more developers to, like you said, adopt other platforms like GOG, for example, is a better one, even though it's not perfect, but it's not like tracking your gameplay and you can...

use it DRM-free, so you can use it, play games offline, all that stuff. Ideally, yeah, you would purchase from a platform like that versus something like Steam if you're concerned about privacy. But yeah, getting adoption is tough. I do kind of have to agree with you that it is a bit of a luxury. Personally, I wouldn't think it's right to not support game developers, especially in these trying times. If it's someone like EA, make up your own mind about that.

But if it's an EA, I wouldn't really encourage that. I don't think it's right. That's just me, though.

I will say, I definitely know it only goes so far, but I really think... think um what's the word i'm looking for like respectful feedback i think will really go a long way and i mean obviously like yeah with somebody like ea it's going to take a lot of emails to get there but especially with some of the smaller developers and studios if you send them an email and it's all about how you say it you know if you're just like you guys suck like okay they're not gonna listen to you but if you

email them and you're like hey i want you to know i really want to buy your game but like i am morally opposed to steam and i will never buy a game from them And it would be really cool if you guys were on like GOG or like sold the game directly or something. If they get enough of those emails, they're going to listen. And again, you know, yeah, with somebody like a big AAA studio, it's going to take a lot of emails. But with the smaller studios, it may not take much.

And it may not be that hard for them to like, oh, let me try selling this on GOG and see if it gets a good response. And if it does, then maybe they'll keep doing it. So I don't know, because I guess I'm thinking in the process that like... Like, they don't know what they don't know, so if they just see, like, this game isn't selling, they don't know how many sales they're missing out on and why, unless somebody messages them and say, hey, I'm not buying your game for this reason.

So, yeah, just a thought. I don't know how well that would work, but... I saw this comment from Anbi Damara in our chat talking about how Steam, when you buy a digital license, they never revoke it. If you buy a game that's no longer sold or taken away, you still have a copy on Steam. And that is true. I wonder how that works for most games if Steam went away, though. That'd be my concern with the whole DRM thing because Steam is still licensing it. It's a similar case with old games.

iOS games, because the Apple App Store works the same way, which is nice, but it's still reliant on downloading and validating these purchases from a centralized app store. So there's privacy concerns with that, and there's also longevity concerns. Who knows if Steam will be around in fifteen years? Can't imagine they're going anywhere, but you never know. I mean, people say that about a lot of companies, and then they disappear.

Well, and another unfortunate thing that I can attest to is just because you buy the game from Steam, the developer is under no obligation to make sure it works on future operating systems. Yeah. So Knights of the Old Republic won. Thankfully, and probably two for all I know. Thankfully, I can still play that one on Switch because one and two were on sale for like ten bucks one time. And I was like, sweet. But yeah, they're not available on Windows Eleven because they just they never updated it.

They never ported it to newer Windows. And there's like hacks on YouTube. They're like, download this file. And I'm like, I'm not downloading a random file from a YouTuber. But yeah, that's something to think about, too. But you're not wrong. Like KOTOR is still in my Steam library. I just can't play it. Can't play it.

So. going back to the beginning here I will say not that I want to encourage piracy either but also like some an approach that i think that i felt like morally right about even if it's not legally right uh and i'm not saying i do this but i feel like it's morally right like if you buy uh something like if you buy a game or like um the case i'm thinking of was like if you buy a dvd or a blu-ray from a store and then you also pirate it just as yeah for convenience purposes

like yeah like that's different and i think if you could like i agree if you're really going to go down this piracy path, which is your decision, if you can also buy the game and just don't use that platform that might be privacy invasive for playing games or anything else, something to think about.

Yeah, personally, I'm not opposed to that, but So going back to some of our earlier questions we got, Dr. Warface says, do you suggest email alias services for things like utilities, like Waterphone and Electric? And also, do you guys suggest an app for investing like Schwab or Fidelity? I guess in regards to the first one, yeah. I do use aliasing services for pretty much everything. But what I've started doing a lot more lately is switching to custom domains. Just because that way if...

It's kind of as portable as you can get, right? I use SimpleLogin, but if SimpleLogin goes away or I want to switch to another service, almost all email providers have the whole wildcard domain, so I don't even need to really import my aliases. I move the domain to the new provider, and I just turn on wildcard, and as I start getting emails, they'll start coming in. So that's kind of my logic. Yeah, there's always a backup if you're using a custom domain. Mm-hmm.

I do the exact same approach, I think, for especially the stuff mentioned in this comment here. I would do the same thing where I use simple login aliases as well, but I use a custom domain for any of that in-person stuff, basically, where the privacy concern about... people tying those email addresses together is not a huge concern, because they already have this other information. And so there is some safety in using a custom domain, like you said.

But there's also a privacy risk, because if you're the only person using this domain, then it's very easy to see if these accounts are connected just based on the domain. So you lose that advantage of using a simple login.com alias, which is unfortunate. But that's kind of the trade-off you make. I definitely, especially if you can get a custom domain, I definitely recommend using email aliases for every single service you use.

That's definitely what I do, and that's mainly to serve as a quick way to prevent people from correlating your accounts, but also just I mean, services get data breaches all the time. And you don't want like your email address to match between those data breaches. Obviously, if you're interested in finding out exactly how often that happens, Nate publishes the data breach. Roundup roundup everywhere. He's like starts in our losing my words today. It's been a long roundup.

Yes. We still have a few hours to go because the party hasn't even started yet here. But yeah, Data Breach Roundup, you can get that emailed to you to keep up with all the data breaches. I think there are a lot more than people would expect. I think you'd agree. Oh, yeah. And then just real quick, Dr. Warface also asked, what's our opinions on Windscribe and do we want to add them down the line? I mean, that's exactly what the forum is for, you know.

I think people have brought up Windscribe in the past. That discussion has been going on for a while. I don't know what the current status on it is. But last I heard, there were issues with them not having released the source code for their current clients yet. And there were also issues with them not having released the audits for their current clients yet. All of their audits are outdated, I believe. They're either outdated or they're inaccessible. I don't remember which.

But either way, they don't... They didn't meet what we wanted to see at the time. So yeah. I think we'll continue to look at it. We should probably look at it again, but I haven't seen that thread brought up recently on the forum. If anyone has new information about Windscribe, if I said something that's wrong, I haven't looked into this for at least a few months, so you can leave a comment on the Windscribe thread and we can look into it. But yeah, I'll try to remember to look into that again.

But as far as I know right now, nothing has really changed from what's been shared over there on the forum. So I would take a look at that if you're interested in Windscribe and you want to Learn more about it. Cool. I wanted to address one real quick from Leonardo Leo. You say, I see many privacy advocates using Mac OS. As a privacy advocate, I think you should use Linux. I want to point out, and this is a very privileged thing, but I know this applies to Jonah too, we have multiple devices.

And so in my case, I primarily use cubes, which I'm very open about is like super overkill for most people. Multiple devices. Multiple devices. And so for me, like this here is a Windows device. And yes, I cry internally every day. But this is also my device because I mentioned a second ago, I primarily use cubes. Cubes cannot video edit, okay? Especially the one I've got. It's just not there. And it's great for like browsing the internet and communicating. But like this is for... production.

This is for editing videos, which are all going to be public anyways, so it doesn't matter. All of that kind of stuff. It's different uses for different things. I think for people who can't have multiple devices, I think we would all agree that Mac is way more private and secure than Windows. If somebody was like, I have programs that just won't run on Linux, given the choice between the two, I would personally recommend a Mac. Again, there's a premium there.

If they have the money, I would recommend a Mac. But It's a, you know, yeah, my point being is like, I think, yeah, we agree with you. I don't think we're advocating for people to use Mac. It's just... You know, different things for different use cases. I do like their hardware, though. I will say I have two MacBook Pros. I have this M for MacBook Pro and I have an M one MacBook Pro and I use Linux on that one because I think it's the nicest Linux machine.

Um, but yeah, in terms of multiple devices, I switched between that and I mainly use this one for writing and videos and the other one for all the other stuff. So cool. Um, I guess in response to what I said, how convenient is it to set up a custom domain? A lot of them have documentation to do it. Personally, I think it's super easy. Take a look at the form again here. It always updates constantly. I wish I could get all my work done on GrapheneOS desktop mode. That would be interesting.

Yeah, I'm waiting for the desktop mode for Androids to come out. They have some form of desktop mode right now. I haven't given it a try. I know some other people on our team have given it a try. And I don't know what the latest is on that. I got a comment from Mr. Rabbit asking about moderation on the form. I'm not sure I totally understand this question because I don't think we have heavy-handed moderation in the first place. I think the moderation on the form is going pretty well.

But there are some discussions about that going on. And we're going to post an update on the form when we know more about what we want to do. So yeah, I think Kind of all I could say, really. I don't think it's a huge issue. I'll be honest, I have nothing to add. I don't really spend a lot of time on the forum just because I'm so busy with other stuff. If somebody calls attention to a specific post or something, I'll go look at it.

And, you know, I go in every week to, like, pull what are the hot topics for the podcast. But even then, I just, like, We were actually talking about this beforehand. I sort by basically what topics are hot right now, and I'm like, oh, these would be good things to talk about. We really put Nate to work over at Privacy Cats. He doesn't have a lot of time to just chat with everyone. I like to be busy, though, and it's fun. It's a good job. I like this job.

Configuration. Hey, the new MacBook Neo is a catch. I said this on our forum, but I'll say it again here.

I think if the Asahi Linux team... knows what they're doing and also if they have the resources which is no guarantee because obviously it's a small open source project so they might not be able to do this but if they can Linux on the new MacBook Neo would be crazy I think so many people would would buy that that would be especially if you're just like web browsing and stuff and you want to avoid Mac OS but you don't need a super I don't even want to say that because

the MacBook Neo is surprisingly powerful. But unless you're doing video editing, it's probably not for you. But I think a lot of people just basically need Chromebook-like hardware. A lot of things are done in the web browser these days. And being able to install Linux on that device would be huge. Because, I mean, it's certainly better than a Chromebook. Both in terms of being able to use Linux and also just the hardware battery life performance.

yeah I mean you know I was interested in it but then I thought about it I'm like yeah that might be kind of a tough tough order for for video editing but it gigs around is a bit tough yeah I'd hope to yeah and also the the screen size like because I sent it to I know my my sister has I think she's still on Windows X and hasn't I don't think her computer can do XI and I've tried to get her to switch to Linux she's a little worried about it so I'm actually gonna see her in a few months and

or in a few weeks, I think. And I'm going to see if like, Hey, can I install Linux on your computer? Can I walk you through this? But, um, so I sent her the MacBook Neo thing. Cause I'm like, Hey, this is relatively cheap. It's like, if all you're doing is browsing the internet, it works great. I know you'll have to get used to Mac, but I trust you. You'll, you'll be fine. But, uh, she immediately, and not like angry, but the first thing she noticed, she's like, Oh, yeah, that's fair.

I will agree with you on that. So it would be cool if they had like even a Yeah, I don't know. It's cool. I like it. It's just, unfortunately, I want one. It's like that phone we talked about a couple weeks ago that runs Linux, Android, and Windows. I want it. I don't need it, but I want it just because I think it's cool and I like the idea. As Jordan just said in the chat, yeah, Asahi Linux is still limited to M.I. and M.I.

And that's the main reason I bring up the whole resources thing because I don't really... fully know what the status of the Asahi Linux project is. I agree, it seems kind of like it's stalled, and I hope that's not really the case. But I don't keep up with it too much in terms of what the developers are doing, unfortunately. So it could be anything. But yeah, if they are able to support newer stuff, that would be fantastic. But yeah, we'll see.

I think it's a bummer that it's still limited to M.One. And maybe, I believe they support the M.One MacBook Air. So probably if you're looking for a Linux laptop now and like the MacBook Neo is convincing, I think the M.One MacBook Air is probably around the same price as the Neo and it's the same performance. So a lot of options. Probably in a few minutes. Okay. Jordan said thirteen is a nice size. I mean, yeah, it's great for travel. Yeah. I don't know.

That may sound very counterintuitive to get a laptop and not travel, but I am that kind of person. configuration set, I bet it would be a game changer in most education systems. I can tell you from the perspective of having done IT for a large education system in Minnesota, it definitely will not be a big game changer for at least K-level. I think it'll be huge for college students for sure.

Maybe some high schools will adopt it, especially if they want to show off, which definitely some schools do. But Repairability-wise, I think... Nope. Repairability-wise, replacing a screen on a Chromebook is like, I don't know, twenty bucks or something, whereas the screen on a MacBook Neo, I don't even know what you're going to do. The other thing is, and the more important thing, I think, in education is that management of macOS devices is such a disaster, really.

It's just really a pain to do any of that stuff on a large scale. And unfortunately, Chromebooks provide a very compelling value proposition to schools because you can buy so many of them for cheaper than the Neosto. And that includes management through Google. And it includes usually a warranty that covers all these repairs. And it still ends up being less than five hundred bucks per device. Which is unfortunate, but that's the reality.

I think for a lot of school systems, it's very hard to convince them to do the most private option as opposed to the cheapest option you possibly can. That usually ends up how most schools and some government programs end up being in general. Oh, well. Yeah, exactly. Exactly like this commenter just said. They will continue to just buy e-waste. I think they're getting ready to open doors.

Yeah, I think we'll probably start wrapping up this stream because, like we said earlier, we're at EFF Austin right now. They have this party going on. It starts at six. But the place that we're at now opens at... Five, so a few minutes ago. So people are starting to mill in. We'll see how many people show up at this thing. I think it'll be pretty cool, though. I think it's going to be good. We have a very cool space here.

I wish we could record here all the time and just go up to... I don't know how often they do events like this with speakers, but... Yeah, we're at the Butterfly Bar in Austin, Vortex. I want to share the list of speakers at this event here. At six o'clock, Hugh Forrest, former president of South by Southwest, is speaking. Then at six thirty-five, Dr. Sharon Strover. Then there's a bit of a break for music, I believe. And then at eight o'clock, there's a panel of the Austin Technology Commission.

And then at eight, there's a talk from John Lipkowski. And then pretty much in that seven to nine period, there will be musicians outside on the main stage. And yeah, a lot of stuff going on. They have a bar here, food, food truck, all that stuff. We'll see who shows up. There should be some other hands-on stuff and other smaller events going on. All kinds of cool stuff.

It's a very cool event, and obviously, you know, it starts in fifty minutes, but I don't know if any of you plan to make it, or if you're in Austin. We talked about it a bit last week, of course, and I mean, if you're local, there's certainly still time to stop by. I think you can come by anytime, because it's open until ten p.m., so there's stuff going on all night. And we'll be here.

And yeah, as far as those talks go, we're definitely hoping to talk with some of the speakers as well or get some of that content available. So we can hopefully share some of the stuff that we saw here. But we will keep everyone posted on what that looks like probably next week. Yep. I got nothing on. All right.

You want to do the outro? Sure. All right. All right. So all the updates from this week in privacy will be shared on the blog every week. That post is actually live now. So sign up for the newsletter or subscribe with your favorite RSS reader if you want to stay tuned. I would like to remind everyone we send that actually right before we start the stream. So that's a good reminder that the stream is starting and it's got all the sources and everything we talked about in there.

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