WhatsApp Is Not Really Encrypted?

Welcome back, everyone, 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 top stories in the data privacy and cybersecurity space, including allegations that WhatsApp is not end-to-end encrypted, France in the UK restricting some online tools for minors, TikTok's new US ownership, and more. I'm Jonah, and with me today is Nate. How are you doing today, Nate? I'm good. I'm good.

How are you? I'm doing excellent. Thank you. For those of you 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 matrix where people can ask questions and get advice about staying private online and preserving their digital

rights. Before we dive into our first WhatsApp stories, I want to give some quick updates with what we've been working on at Privacy Guys this week. Why don't I start off by handing it over to you, Nate, to talk about the video side of things? Sure. There's not too much new with the videos. Let's see, the smartphone course for Android that We're adding on to this, so it's hard for me to know how to describe it.

The smartphone course we're doing, the intermediate tier, the Android section is done. And I believe we're just trying to work out some technical issues with PeerTube. Once it's on PeerTube, we will be posting that for members. The iOS version we're hoping to have done next week. And Jordan has begun editing the private browsing video that I've been talking about.

And that will hopefully also be coming out here soon and in the meantime i have moved on to scripting a video about private messaging so i'm excited to share that one with you guys and um again we've just been putting out a lot of clips we started putting out um horizontal clips as well, like regular aspect ratio clips on the Privacy Guide Shorts channel.

So I know a lot of you guys, it's a really common thing when we do these kind of news shows that people want something where they can share it quickly and easily in just that story with people. So definitely check that out if that's something that you would like.

nice um in other privacy guides news things have been again being pretty active on our forum lately lots of good discussions going on i know that you nate and freya as well have been working on a lot of news brief articles lately um so those have been coming out um other stuff is still being worked on again behind the scenes but i know i've been talking to em about a big project that She has been working on for the past few weeks now, and that's coming out relatively soon.

Hopefully, within the next few weeks or so, we'll have more updates to share with you on the stream about that. But yeah, lots of progress is being made, lots of big plans for the site and for the videos in twenty twenty six, especially as we get into the new year. I feel like a lot of people who have been working on all this stuff have been feeling pushed pretty hard lately.

We've been doing a lot of work, but hopefully it all pays off and people like it and we can reach new people with all of this privacy stuff. But in terms of specific updates, I don't think we've pushed a new release of the website on GitHub or anything like that. So no changes to the recommendations or anything so far. But yeah, all of that stuff is still being worked on in the background.

And if you are hoping to see something in particular, definitely join our forum, join the community and talk with us a bit about what you want to see because a lot of the stuff that we're doing is really built on this community and what you all want to see and what would make the most impact in the privacy rights space. With all these updates out of the way, I think we can move on to some of the biggest news stories that we've seen in privacy and security in the past week.

I know you wanted to start off with the headline story here, so why don't I pass it off to you, Nate, to talk about that. Yeah. Sounds good. Let's talk about WhatsApp. So, uh, WhatsApp for, I'm sure most of our listeners know, you know, it's a encrypted messenger brought to you

from Meta, the same people who make Facebook and Instagram and well bought Instagram. And, um, Yeah, it's WhatsApp, as far as we know, is end-to-end encrypted and it uses the signal protocol. So there are a lot of concerns about the metadata collection of WhatsApp. But up until now, we've always believed, well, the content itself is encrypted, which is better than nothing. Although there is now a new lawsuit that alleges that, no, actually, that's not the case.

And they don't mean that in like a, well, technically kind of sort of like they mean it literally like, no, it is not end-to-end encrypted. And this lawsuit claims that if you are a meta or WhatsApp employee, all you need to do to access the messages is you send a task, which is, I guess, just what they call like their internal tickets or requests and metas internal systems. You send a task to a meta engineer and you just say, hey, I need access to these users messages for whatever reason.

And they say that the engineering team will then grant access, often without any scrutiny at all, and the workers' workstation will then have a new window or widget that they can pull up any WhatsApp users' messages based on the user's ID number. which is a unique number. And then once they have the access, you can read messages. They say there's no separate decryption step. It's just available right there, which I'll come back to that, I guess.

They say that these messages are commingled with additional messages from unencrypted sources. Not entirely sure what that means. Maybe they're talking about the DMA. I think WhatsApp now has to federate or combine with other third-party messengers as part of the DMA. But I could be wrong about that. I'm speculating. They also say messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated. So this is essentially a real-time tool.

And they say the access is unlimited and you are able to go back indefinitely in time to view messages all the way back to the user's first messages when they open the account, including messages the users believe they have deleted. So it is important to note that this lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up these claims. They say that there were some courageous whistleblowers and – Yeah, I mean, obviously, Meta is disputing this.

They say that these claims are, quote, categorically false and absurd. And they even say WhatsApp has been encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade. So, yeah, this is definitely a big if-true kind of moment. And it's very concerning because WhatsApp is... incredibly popular around the world here in the U S not so much, but in other parts of the world, in Europe, in Asia, it's incredibly popular. And again, up until now, I want to reiterate, we have concerns with WhatsApp.

I'm not saying it's great and you should use it, but at least it was like, well, you know, at least the messages themselves are encrypted. And that's something that's more than we can say for SMS or anything like that. And apparently we can't even say that now, uh, potentially. So yeah, The only other thought I wanted to point out is I mentioned the whole widget thing where they say there's no separate decryption step.

In theory, that doesn't necessarily mean the messages aren't encrypted because maybe the decryption is happening within the widget. However, the whole point of end-to-end encryption is that that shouldn't be possible regardless, whether they're being stored in plain text, whether they're being stored encrypted. The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that the only people who should have access are the ends. And the server is not supposed to be one of those ends, cough, cough, Zoom.

Sorry, I had to take a shot at them for that one. But yeah, like I said, this really is big if true and would really be bad because of WhatsApp's really large user base.

I think that's a really good point you just said about how the server shouldn't be one of the ends, especially because we know with WhatsApp in particular, but also with some other end-to-end encrypted messengers, Most notably, iMessage, unless you have advanced data protection enabled, even if end-to-end encryption is working perfectly fine, very often they will have these backup features which are not end-to-end encrypted, and that potentially acts as a backdoor

for service providers to get into it. As far as I know, that is the case with WhatsApp, and that is a potential way that this could be true without the... end-to-end encryption of the transmission itself being broken. Maybe they have a way to access these backups easily. But again, that's speculation.

I think it's important to remember with this story, and actually one of our community members just left a comment about this as well, which is that this is... a legal complaint right now it's not at the stage where any evidence has been presented at all there's no technical evidence within the document that's been shared that demonstrates any sort of back door or that there's any sort of compromise with the encryption of whatsapp um so That being said, with an app like WhatsApp that's closed

source and completely under the control of Facebook, this is always a danger, especially because Facebook has this history of extensive metadata collection, extensive... you know, just general data collection, actually. And they are a company that's built entirely on this like data driven advertising model where collecting as much data as they can is really paramount to their business.

That creates a situation where it's very hard to trust that they've implemented end-to-end encryption correctly, that they're not trying to weaken it behind the scenes, or that this is completely impossible. So I don't think that this is... out of the question. But again, this hasn't been proven. This just goes to show, I think, that encryption in these apps needs to be completely verifiable.

It needs to be open source, it needs to use standard protocols, and it can't just be a matter of trust in the publisher of these apps themselves. Compared to a messenger like Signal, which is open source, like if this story had come out about Signal right now, many people, security experts, auditors could be pouring over that source code, trying to see if there's any way that this could be true, right? And that just isn't possible with WhatsApp.

And that's the danger of using these proprietary closed source applications like this for your communications instead of more secure alternatives.

Um, the other thing I wanted to say about this whole WhatsApp story is that even if this isn't true, even if they can't read your messages themselves, it's well known at this point that WhatsApp is not doing anything in terms of preventing the collection of metadata, which is, um, you know, data about who you're talking with data about when you're using the app, um, all of that stuff. That's not like the message content itself. Right. And so.

I mean, there's this famous quote from a U.S. government official where he goes like, we kill people based on metadata, right? Because they don't actually need the content of your messages. If people have access to this data, they can infer a lot about you, who you talk to. says a lot about what you're probably talking about, especially if you're doing it on a regular basis or anything like that. And all of that can be determined without breaking end-to-end encryption at all.

And that's part of why I think WhatsApp is such a dangerous application to use because none of that metadata is protected. And Facebook is the last company on earth who I would trust with that metadata in question. So... Even if it's not true, I would really encourage people to not use WhatsApp personally. But yeah, if it is true, that is even worse. We will have to keep an eye on this story for sure because it is a big if true moment. Absolutely. Yeah, I agree with everything you just said.

This is one of the reasons, like, we know that open source is not the end-all be-all. It doesn't guarantee that something is private or secure.

But like you said, if this was an allegation made against, like, Signal or SimpleX, like, this wouldn't even really be a story because we could, I mean, I certainly could, and I don't know enough code for that, but we as a community could easily just go pour through the source code and be like yeah that's not what's happening here we can we can prove that's not happening um but yeah and and um i i i do thank that listener for pointing out like yes these are allegations they

haven't presented any evidence i will be really interested to see what sort of evidence uh they present if any um And yeah, it's, and like you said, the metadata is so, so, so important. The EFF has an amazing page where they talk about the importance of metadata and they use some examples, like, um, some really sensitive examples.

Like if you call the suicide hotline and sorry, I probably just got us demonetized, but you know, you call the hall, the hotline at two in the morning from the golden gate bridge. Do you really need the contents of the phone call to know what was probably going on there? And Yeah, I forget who it was that said that quote, but that is a really famous quote you can find very easily with a web search. And that's what he was saying is exactly that.

Metadata is so revealing that you can make a really convincing argument without the content. And at that point, you can authorize a military strike. Like, yeah. I mean, is it possible that something else is going on? Sure, of course, but... Yeah, it's pretty wild. It's good enough for most people, I think. For sure. This is why we encourage things like Signal, Simplex, things that are metadata resistant, are fully open source, that go above and beyond to protect users and their data, for sure.

Before we move on really quick, we did get a question. How do you convince your peers to stop using WhatsApp? Do you have any thoughts on that, Nate? Send them this story. I think – okay. I mean there's – we get questions like this all the time, and they're great questions. But unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. If we had the one secret answer that could get people to take their privacy seriously, we would have used it by now.

But I think – One thing, so I'm thinking particularly in the context of like Europeans and Asians, like people where WhatsApp is like a common way to connect with businesses and stuff like that. And it's, I hate to say it, but it's quote unquote kind of a necessity.

I think for those people, there's, I forget where I heard this, but somebody really floated the idea of instead of trying to get people off WhatsApp, trying to get them onto something else in the sense that like, You can keep WhatsApp and you can use it for when you have to contact a business in Germany or something, but all your friends are also on Signal and we could use that too. And then it turns into a thing where like, in my life, I still use SMS. I still have some services.

I logged into a bank this morning that texted me an SMS code, not happy about it, but there's nothing I'm going to do about it. So I still have to use SMS. I can't stop using it, but I've got ninety, ninety five percent of my friends and my family on signal. And that's where I do most of my work. And so I think I think trying to encourage people rather than like, oh, stop using WhatsApp, try to encourage people like, oh, we're all over here on signal.

And sorry, this just popped into my head real quick while I was talking. I have had amazing success by focusing on features. Like I hate to say it, but let's be honest. Most people don't care about privacy and security enough that that's their driving factor to move. It's just kind of a happy bonus. So my wife used to be a wizard at this and I swear to God, she should teach a class.

She was so good at getting people to switch to signal and she never brought up privacy and like, you know, she'd mentioned like, yeah, it's this encrypted messenger, but like It's got bigger, you know, bigger attachment sizes and we're comparing to SMS here. So I don't know how it compares to WhatsApp, but like it's got bigger attachment sizes. We can send gifts, we can send reactions because this is before RCS was a thing. It's like all these amazing quality of life features.

And I swear to God, five minutes later, I would get a text from the person she was talking to like, Hey, I'm on signal now. I'm like, damn, I've been trying to get this person on signal for two years. How did you do this? So, yeah, I think that's probably unfortunately how we're going to get like, quote unquote, the average person to want to switch is by showing them the quality of life advantages. And, you know, yeah, absolutely. Figure out what signal does better than WhatsApp.

I totally agree. You kind of stole the thing that I wanted to talk about, so I won't spend too long on it, but I mean, that is definitely my, my, I truly believe that like all of these private alternatives, pretty much in most of these sectors, if you really look at them and if you really start to use them, they are also quality of life improvements because I think people are fed up with technology and all of this surveillance and all of these anti-features that like all of our

computers are doing things that we didn't ask them to do now or AI is being jammed into them or that it's popping up. It was annoying decades ago in Microsoft Word with Clippy and Copilot is just as annoying now in all of those products. People just want functional tools, I think, and focusing on that aspect I think that's probably the best way to drive adoption of these things because it's just, it's simpler, it's more reliable, and it works better in my experience.

And finding ways that it works better than WhatsApp and focusing on that rather than trying to compare like the security features that they already have, like you said, I think that that is the way to go.

Moving on to our next story here. This was reported by The Guardian. French lawmakers vote to ban social media use by under-fifteens. So this starts out, legislation which also bans mobile phones in high schools would make France the second country after Australia to take such a step. French lawmakers have passed a bill that would ban social media use by under-fifteens, a move championed by President Emmanuel Macron as a way to protect children from excessive screen time.

The Lower National Assembly adopted the text by a vote of one-thirty to twenty-one in a lengthy overnight session from Monday to Tuesday. It will now go to the Senate, France's upper house ahead of becoming law. The legislation, which also provides a ban on mobile phones in high schools, which I think is a great idea personally as a former educator, would make France the second country to take such a step following Australia's ban for under-sixteens in school. December.

Social media has grown, so is concerned that too much screen time is harming child development and contributing to mental health models.

And so my big question coming out of this, I think, is how they plan to enforce this, because we've talked a lot in the past about age verification, and I know this is a huge issue in Australia right now, as is I mean, this article doesn't mention that, but they're the first country to really take an approach like this, banning not only very young children, but teenagers from social media.

That's very challenging to do without these invasive age verification things that we have always been very concerned.

against because age verification and ID verification it's not just a matter of like affecting children um it forces everyone who's signing up for these platforms to be verified which includes adults so there's no opt-out process here um and that's a very dangerous privacy concern how these IDs are going to be implemented in the first place I think and also um what data is going to be shared with all of these platforms. That's something that we'll have to keep an eye on.

So I'm not seeing in this particular article how the French plan to deal with this question. I know that this is a pretty common issue with a lot of legislation like this, where lawmakers kind of put some arbitrary goal together without any steps or plan on how to make it happen in a reasonable, secure, and private way. But yeah, that's my biggest question out of this story. Did you have a chance to look into this story any more than that, Nate? No, just the article itself that you read.

If I remember correctly, I don't have it pulled up in front of me like you do. If I remember correctly, they did say that towards the end, what you said there, where it's like, oh, they don't really have a plan for how they're going to implement this. That's something they're going to talk about next week. I do find that so funny. Yeah. My favorite example of this, New York City did that a few years ago where they banned the sale of internal combustion engine cars.

And then like the next year they went, hey, where are we going to put all the chargers for these electric vehicles? And I'm just like, seriously, nobody had that conversation. Come on, guys. So, you know, yeah, it's and it goes to show. just this is something I harp on a lot personally. It's like, I think we need better tech literacy in general worldwide. And cause we, we have a lot of, I know I've said this before, but we have a lot of elderly people who, you know, to their defense, I get it.

Like a lot of them existed in the days where like color TV was the newest, fanciest thing. And now we've got LLMs and that's, that's a lot to wrap your head around. But then on the other hand of this end of the spectrum, we've got these people who are, I love to cruise r slash tales from tech support on Reddit, but it also really makes me facepalm because on more than one occasion, I've seen stories like my Wi-Fi isn't working.

And then when they're like, okay, well, are the lights on in the router? And they're like, I'm not at home right now. Well, of course your Wi-Fi is not working. Or, you know, I've also seen the ones where they're like, again, you know, my computer won't turn on. And it's like, okay, well, is it plugged in? I can't see under the desk. The lights are off. You don't say, and I've seen those stories multiple times.

And so it's like multiple people, and that's just on Reddit, multiple people are having this issue. So I think my point being, we need better tech literacy, at least in the basics. I'm not saying everybody needs to know how to code and self-host their own everything, but just to understand... That like you were saying, that's a big thing. It's age verification. No, it's not. It's identity verification. And just to give credit, I got that one from Taylor Lorenz.

And, you know, it's you're going to have to upload your ID to people watching this in France, regardless of your age and the UK, which we'll talk about in a minute. Like it's not just minors, because how else are they supposed to know that you're not a minor? Yeah. And a lot of these politicians just think like, oh, that's a technical problem. Just as one of my other friends likes to say, nerd harder and we'll find a solution. And it's like, no, there is no solution. There is no magic bullet.

Technology is not magic. I feel like on this show, we've talked quite a bit about age verification and these ID verification problems. And I would definitely encourage people, if you are unfamiliar with some of those problems, with some of this topic to check out the interview that you did with Taylor Lawrence, because I think you really covered a lot of good stuff that was more focused on how that's going to affect the US and some legislation that's going on.

But it really does apply to all of this stuff going on around. around the world. We see it not just in France and Australia, but the UK, for example, has very strict ID verification laws. It's becoming a real problem. Ignoring the implementation side of this, Do you have any opinions of your own on this social media ban for children in general? Is that something you support just as a general concept? Or what do you think?

I mean, I have some thoughts on this if you don't, but I'll pass it off to you first. Oh, I have thoughts. My thoughts... Honestly, it's complicated because on the one hand... I, like most people, I do not neatly fit into one particular political label or another. I have thoughts that are left-leaning and thoughts that are right-leaning. And one of my more libertarian thoughts is that parents should be in charge of their kids.

And I don't mean that in the sense of like, well, parents should just raise their kids. I mean like parents should have the autonomy and the freedom to decide if they think their kids are ready to see a movie, ready to play a game, ready to engage with the internet. I think parents should have that freedom. But at the same time, I think the internet is very distinctly different from a movie or a video game.

Well, maybe not an online game, but like an offline game in the sense that the internet is a much, much bigger place with much more disturbing content on it. I'm sure whatever the worst thing you've seen in a horror movie is, there's probably something worse on the internet.

And I think it's a lot to ask parents to constantly know, even if it's the most well-behaved, well-meaning, good kid, that doesn't necessarily mean that the people they're interacting with online are also acting in good faith. And I think that's a lot to put parents in the position of having to constantly try to monitor all of that.

Yeah. It's tough because I don't want to take away the autonomy of the parents to make those choices, but that's also a lot of work for people who work full-time and may not necessarily have the tech skills and everything. Um, just one more thing real quick. Somebody here said in the comments that, you know, regulation is how we get clean water, clean food, you know, safe food. And it's obviously it's not perfect. You know, things get recalled all the time, but I think we can all agree.

It's a lot better. The term snake oil comes from the old West days when people would literally roll into town with literal snake oil and be like, yeah, this will cure your cancer and arthritis and this, that, and the other and everything. And like, just give me your money and I'm going to be Fifty miles away by the time you realize I ripped you off and you don't have a way to get me because of the technology limitations at the time.

And so regulations aren't always bad, but it's definitely – I don't know. I think it's a mix. I think there's pros and cons, and I don't really know what the right answer is. That comment that you pointed out is a good one because it does sum up a bit of how I feel about social media, which is – If it's such a problem, I think what we've seen in society is that this isn't a problem that only affects children.

And personally, I don't think that children are... significantly worse off than anyone else who's constantly being exposed to these social media algorithms. And so from this perspective, we have food regulation, we have clean water regulation. Could we have algorithmic regulation that applies to all of these users of the platform to protect ourselves in general as a society against the harms of social media?

I think that that could be an approach because I think what people don't think about or realize is that the algorithms that make up something like Facebook and Twitter are not like they're not necessary for social media to function um by the way facebook you know from a user's perspective was probably totally fine before they implemented like the news feed and stuff and people generally like twitter and the chronological ordering of tweets from only people that you follow before you know all

this discovery stuff was baked in and it really tried to get you into these bubbles and echo chambers that I think is causing a lot of people harm, not just children. And I think we're focusing on children because children are, you know, growing up in this and it's preventing them from like building the skills that they need to survive in adult society, unfortunately, that most people like adults already have.

But beyond that like i think the harms to all people are pretty apparent by social media and i think that some social media platforms like um mastodon for example demonstrate that building communities that you can interact with in a more healthy way um It's possible. And I think that regulation on that front, which would make these big tech companies more like Mastodon, for example, and Mastodon isn't the perfect social media, by the way, but it's a direction that we could go in.

We need to, I think, get back to the internet being a place where we share information and we share knowledge and make it less of a place where we just consume whatever information the overlords of the internet have put on the screen in front of us, right?

It needs to be more intentional, and I think that that's the sort of thing which could be done through legislation that doesn't involve age verification or anything like that, because I think Banning algorithms like that is really a lot like enforcing clean food and water regulations and that sort of thing. It's a public health issue at the end of the day.

I also definitely agree with the sentiment that I've seen from some people in the chat and also in this article from some people that they interviewed, which is that bands like this, they are overly simplistic, as this group said in the article here. But it's also a form of digital paternalism. I think that is true. It's not really the government's place to make these decisions, I think, in terms of parenting children. And you got into this before. And it is hard.

Exactly like you said, there is a balance because there's so much going on in people's lives. It's so common for both parents to be working now. Some people have to work two jobs. Society is just crazy at the moment, right? And so... Yes, it's hard, but I don't think that that should be an excuse for the government to step in in this way. The government should be stepping in and making people's lives easier so that they have time to parent their children themselves, right?

That would be an ideal outcome here. What if we all made enough money where we had the time to educate our children properly? What if the government tried to do something about that? I don't know. Just a thought. So, yeah, I don't think it's when somebody could actually afford to stay home and be a parent. Right.

Now, I especially I really agree with and Henry used to say this a lot on surveillance report to exactly what you just said that the we keep focusing on like social media is bad for kids social media is bad for kids. social media is bad for everyone. Yeah. Social media is bad for me. I notice it even like when I spend too much time on social media, I start to get that FOMO and I start to, you know, it really starts to consume me.

And I, I'm sure that some people are more susceptible to that than others. Like I know some people that their relationship with Facebook is like my relationship with my phone where like half the time I'm like, where is it? I don't even remember. But These are companies that are paid full time to figure out how can we keep people on the platform longer. That is their job. I really want to stress that. However good you are at your job, that's how good they are.

It's just not a fair fight is what I'm getting at. It's really unfortunate that we keep focusing on... This is bad for kids and ignoring the fact that everyone is impacted by this. And I think it would be, to your point, if we're going to regulate anything, we need to regulate the companies and the algorithms and make it less harmful for everyone. And then maybe we wouldn't need to resort to these extreme measures.

The other thing I would say about this ban is that we are in the... really early days of the internet still if you really think about it um and this was i i didn't really think about this a lot until i heard um i think i was watching a hank green video where he said something to this effect where like in in terms of like society in general like this many to many communication system that we have with the internet is extremely new and if you really think about it like most people

have probably only been in like the social media mass communication landscape for maybe ten, fifteen years. I know like you've probably been on the internet longer, like some of us people who have been into technology have been a bit longer than that. But for most people, it's only been around like fifteen years and like some whole countries even today are still like just getting connected to the internet and just getting phones and it's just becoming a problem.

Like this is an extremely new development in society and I don't think that we know like what works and what doesn't work right and I don't think that we've given enough thought into all of this stuff because there are so many benefits to to be honest there's so many benefits to even social media if it's if it's done properly um that outright banning it just doesn't make a ton of sense to me but clearly something has to be done and I hope that other governments outside France and in

Australia try and think about these more nuanced approaches to how all of this technology can be improved and a better tool in like people's lives rather than just like seeing the problems that these especially these American big tech companies have created on the internet and like quickly reacting to it and just banning it outright. I think there's some middle ground to be found here that I would really try to encourage. Totally agree.

With that out of the way, in a little bit, we're going to talk about TikTok. But first, we're going to talk about stories from the

UK. That is correct. So keeping with the vein of age-gating the internet, the UK House of Lords has voted to ban VPNs for children as the pressure on privacy tools increases. So this is... I mean, the headline kind of says it all. The House of Lords, I'm not intimately familiar with the UK's legislative system, but it's one part of their legislative branch. I believe they said the House of Commons is the other one, if I remember correctly. Yes, that's correct. Okay, yeah.

So basically, the House of Lords has passed this. Now it's going to go on to the House of Commons. And I may be mixing this one up with France, but I want to say that... The president or prime minister or whoever has expressed support for this, so if it passes the House of Commons, that is probably not good. But the good news is it says here the labor government has a large majority in the commons, but it's not clear whether it will attempt to overturn the amendment or support it.

So, yeah, this may face scrutiny or it may just fly right on through. We don't know at this time. But it says that the vote was passed two oh seven to one fifty nine and that within twelve months, VPNs, let's see, regulations which prohibit the provision to the UK children of a relevant VPN service must be enacted. And this is specifically in response to the Online Safety Act, which has not gone well.

Within, God, I think within days of the Online Safety Act taking effect, there were stories about how a VPN could get around it. People were using their parents' IDs. I think some people were even using screenshots from video games, specifically the game Death Stranding. So yeah, that did not go over well. There was also, let me see, if I remember here, I think there was a second law. Again, I may be thinking of the France one.

I read all of these stories yesterday, so they may have jumbled up in my mind a little bit. Um, yeah, I'm not seeing anything about that. So yeah, this is a, this is unfortunate. This is kind of like we were just saying it. And I love when governments just pile band-aids on top of each other. Like we passed the online safety act. Oh, that didn't work. Well, let's, let's ban VPNs. And then they're going to find a way. Cause it's a cat and mouse. They're going to find a way around VPNs.

And you know, like we were just talking about a minute ago, the source of the issue is what harmful content online. Right. So. Why don't you address the content online? And to their defense, some of the stuff that's harmful, if harmful at all, is out of their reach. If a website is based in another part of the EU, India, America, they can't really do anything about that. But I don't know. This just feels to me like, oh, it didn't work. We need to add a Band-Aid.

Yeah, it's a cat and mouse, so I don't know where they think this is going to end in its logical conclusion. And it's not great, because obviously VPNs are not a total anonymity tool. They definitely do get hyped up a little bit too much, especially in a lot of sponsor segments. But they do still have a legitimate use case, and they are... I would say they're an easy way to make some improvements to your privacy.

Like a lot of the VPN providers we recommend have DNS block lists that will block known trackers, known ads, known malware. It will change your IP address, which is part of the way that companies fingerprint you online. And again, not perfect. Definitely leaves a lot to be desired, but it's a great start. And especially if your threat model is like you don't want your ISP selling your internet history, you don't want your ISP knowing where you go online, which is totally fair.

Yeah, I do think they serve a purpose, and it's really unfortunate to see them losing a major benefit, which is that you don't need to turn over ID, because that kind of defeats the whole privacy thing, in my opinion. I think that's about all I got on that one. Absolutely. I saw this story earlier... this week and I sent out some posts on social media about it that have been doing pretty popular.

But basically I was talking about these VPN bans in in general, because I think that a lot of people, and especially techie people in this space, hear about bans on technology. They hear about a VPN ban, or they hear about a ban on end-to-end encrypted messengers, like Signal, if something like chat control were to be rolled out. And they think, like, oh, I can still continue to use these tools, and... And I'll be fine.

Even if this affects other people, I'm smart enough to know how to bypass all of this stuff, and it won't be an issue for me. And that's what we've seen with age verification rolling out. A lot of people are just using VPNs, right? But I think... The problem with banning and criminalizing very common, very mundane and very legitimately useful technologies like VPNs, for example, is that it makes crimes very easy to commit and very commonplace.

And this is the first step in what we see in these authoritarian regimes. regimes where, you know, they try to fill the books with as many, you know, potential crimes or violations as possible so that even if you're doing something completely unrelated to the crime at hand, like if you're using a VPN and the government decides they don't like it, like if you're protesting your government, for example, in the UK, they can very easily like look at your technology.

They can look at you being a VPN user or using this end-to-end encrypted tool or whatever, if any of these laws pass, and they can use that fact against you, not only in the courts as a crime, but also in the courts of public opinion, so to speak, where they can really label you as something which you probably aren't. And people will judge you for that. And that comes from making these legitimate tools seem evil and villainizing them and really just changing their reputation.

It affects people in a lot of ways, and it affects people in non-technical ways. It's the big point that I wanted to make here. So I just... Yeah, I would be worried about any... This is the same argument that we had with Shack Control a while ago, which I'm sure will crop up again, but with any of these total bans on technology... I just want people to remember that if you live in these countries, this is not just a technical issue.

And you need to be keeping an eye on this stuff and keeping up with it and speaking out against it because this will end up affecting everyone. It's a bit of a slippery slope argument, but we're definitely at the top of some slippery slopes right now. Yeah. And the other thing I want to add onto that, that's, that's all absolutely true. And you're absolutely right. A lot of the time we don't think about the non-technical side of this, but also I personally, I really hate that.

Like, Oh, well I know how to get around this. That's great. A lot of people don't. And privacy, you know, privacy is a team sport and privacy is a human right. Like, right. Like we have that in the merch store. For those of you who don't know, we have a merch store shop.privacyguides.org. And we have a shirt that's super awesome. That has article twelve. I don't, God, I'm such a nerd. I have this memorized. It's the nineteen forty eight United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

Article twelve says that everyone has a right to privacy. I don't have it memorized. That's going to be my new project is I'm going to memorize the actual article. But it's like it says like this is a human right. We're talking about like water, food, shelter, the right to live, the right to education and also the right to privacy.

And so if we're going to believe that, if we're going to sit here and say, yes, privacy is a right, the government is infringing on my rights by taking away my privacy, then that's really messed up to say, oh, well, this doesn't affect me, so meh. No, everybody should have that right. Even if you know how to get around it, lots of people don't. Yeah. At this point, I don't care what form your compassion takes. If you're like, well, then I'm going to teach people how to get around it.

There may be legal repercussions for that. I'm not endorsing that. You do you. But whether that's I'm going to teach people how to get around it, whether that's I'm going to write my politician, whatever it is, don't just sit back and go, oh, well, this doesn't affect me, so I don't care. Because what's that classic poem about the Holocaust? First, they came for everyone else. And by the time they came for me, there was no one left.

And I wouldn't be surprised if that happens in some places because we keep saying it doesn't affect me until it does, and it's incredibly selfish, and we need to get out of that. Sorry. While we're on the topic of these bans of technology for children, I saw this comment in our YouTube chat where they said, as far as I can tell, EIDAS will be used for age verification within the EU.

Basically, these digital ID systems will allow websites to request some sort of ID on your phone or computer and only get certain information about it in a supposedly privacy-respecting way. And I think we've talked a bit about digital IDs in the past, but I just want to reiterate. This is certainly a better solution than the current setup that a lot of websites are doing where you have to scan your face and you have to scan pictures of your ID because that is a privacy nightmare.

It's also a security nightmare. We've already seen, I think, multiple data breaches of all of these age verification and ID databases being leaked. And now all of this public information is out there. That is a huge security problem. It's an economic problem because there will be identity theft, like the government is enabling extremely scary stuff by promoting these technologies.

And in the US here, I know that the government uses vendors like real.me or all these other identity verification companies. ID.me? Yes, thank you. Something like that. I'm confusing it with real ID, which is separate. But yeah, they use these for official government things instead of making their own ID and login system. And like, that is extremely concerning from a security perspective.

But, The overall point that I want to make with this is that it's not only about the privacy of the individual transaction being made here. This is also a censorship issue because to get this ID in the first place, you need to give away a lot of your information. So that's a privacy issue right there. Maybe in the EU, a lot of people already have national ID cards. You might be used to it. Here in the US, that isn't necessarily commonplace. I know that...

The current administration is really pushing for it to be, and they're really supporting everyone getting a password and having digital IDs on their phone, which is a whole separate thing.

But the issue being created is that as these governments try to age-gate as many services and as many sites as possible, as they can possibly justify – um it really creates a wall around all of these things that the government has absolute control over whether you can cross that wall and access that site and they can do something like revoke your id if they want to for whatever reason um kick you off of practically half the internet right um and we're seeing these id verification

laws and directives expand far beyond their original intent of like protecting adult services. Now we're talking about social media sites. Now we're talking about VPNs. We've seen them affect in the UK, potentially Wikipedia, for example, which is just a knowledge sharing service.

That's something that should be people should have a right to access that frankly and it's crazy that the government would step in and get in the middle of that and that is what we're enabling with these digital id concepts it is a whole system that the government has sole control over and it is really in my opinion antithetical to the internet and what computers and the internet were made for. We just cannot accept these restrictions on the free flow of information sharing and knowledge.

And so even with these like private and zero knowledge digital ID solutions, it creates a real danger to society that I don't think we should tolerate using this technology at all for gating access to information especially. Yeah, totally agree. Great point. Information longs to be free.

And there are many who argue that information should, I mean, I think that's why, um, I don't know if this is the ethos for privacy guides, but at the new oil, like I've never charged for articles for blog posts. Like I'll do early access, but then like a week later it goes public, you know, but I, there's no part of my website that is, Oh, you got to join a membership to access this premium stuff. It's like, no, cause it's information and it should be free.

And yeah, to put up those barriers to information is really scary for the potential. Absolutely.

Going back to something you said a little while ago now about the government just constantly putting band-aids on their current bad solutions, we have this story here from Independent. AI and facial recognition to be rolled out as Britain's broken policing system faces sweeping reforms. Officials say using AI will free up six million hours of police time, the equivalent of three thousand officers each year.

This article says the Home Secretary has announced plans to ramp up the use of AI in live facial recognition as she unveils sweeping reforms to fix Britain's broken policing system.

Shobana Mahmood, sorry if I pronounced that wrong, is investing a hundred forty million pounds to roll out technology which she hopes will free up six million police hours each year, the equivalent of three thousand officers, as part of the biggest overhaul of a quote, outdated policing model designed for another century.

AI technology will be deployed to rapidly analyze CCTV, doorbell, and mobile phone footage, detect deepfakes, carry out digital forensics, and speed up administration such as form filling, redaction, and transcription. These measures are part of a bigger overhaul to policing that it seems like England is seeing right now. But I think I saw somewhere in this article. Now I can't find it. Well, I think the overall point is that these AI tools are well known already to be quite unreliable, right?

We're going to see a lot of Like when we've seen this ruled out in other law enforcement jurisdictions, and especially like even here in the US, for example, recently, we talked a lot about this last week. These AI tools being ruled out, they're not reliable. They're making mistakes and people are... taking the claims of these systems at face value. And I think it's a really dangerous situation that the UK is putting themselves in by enabling this technology.

So definitely something to be wary about, I think. When you were reading this article, did you see any other points you wanted to point out here? I think just to back up what you're saying, yeah, I have a friend here in the US who works in law enforcement. He's not a cop, but he's like a civilian employee. And he sends me stories, I swear to God, a couple times a month where he's like, oh, so one of our cops used AI.

And I'm pretty sure this is the official sanctioned system they're allowed to use. Like, I don't even think this is somebody being like, quote unquote, lazy and going outside the system. He's like, yeah, so this cop tried to use AI to like do his police report and it just got everything completely wrong.

Like you said, it was a two in the morning and just all these little things that like, you know, don't sound that bad to us, but it's like, yeah, that means this case gets thrown out in court because the prosecutor will absolutely tear this apart. And just, yeah, they're completely unreliable. And he sends me these stories all the time. And I'm assuming these are just the really bad ones he sends me that are like, wow, they got this really wrong.

But yeah, AI is, so so bad yeah i found this article i was looking for it was just one sentence but um they're creating this national center dedicated to using the new technology called police ai despite just recently in ai hallucination influencing um a decision by one of their police departments to ban um fans of uh israeli uh football team from a match in Birmingham last year.

So they're already experienced with the problems that this can cause and the problems that you see when you really just take these at face value. People aren't giving this AI oversight and it causes real problems. And I cannot imagine that they've really learned from these mistakes. I think that this sort of thing as we've seen, it's, it's only going to become more frequent and more of a problem. I think that that is the biggest problem with this, that I would, that I would point out for sure.

It's crazy. And it's such high stakes too. It's one thing when like, you know, I'm cause I've, I've admitted to this before. I'll use like Braves Leo. If I'll go to the search engine first and I'll be like, you know, I'll type in the keywords or whatever I think should pop up the thing I'm looking for, but then I'll get like, Oh God, actually, what was it? Um, I think it was with WhatsApp.

Yeah, it was this whole WhatsApp thing that our headline story, actually, as I'm working on this script for private messaging, I was looking for a story about how WhatsApp tried to change the terms of service so that they could share data with other meta properties like Instagram for targeted advertising. And everybody got really mad. And so I went to Brave and I typed in like, you know, WhatsApp data sharing, whatever, whatever. And all I got was this week's headline story.

And I'm just like, oh my God, okay, forget this. And so I went to Leo and I was like, hey, I'm looking for this story, blah, blah, blah. And it was like, oh, you're thinking of this from twenty twenty one or whatever. And so, yeah, but I've had these times where, like, I ask Leo a question and it works. And then ten minutes later, I have the same problem. So I ask it another question.

But for some reason, it loops back into the original question and just literally word for word answers the first question. And I'm like, no, that's. all right, let me close this window and start a new one. And just the point being that like, it's amazing that they see that kind of behavior and they're like, yeah, this will be great for determining whether people go to jail, have a criminal record, possibly end up on death row.

I don't think they have death row in the UK, but you know, just like we can completely ruin somebody's life. And we know that this thing is not perfect, but we're willing to do that. That's wow. That's insane. Yeah. No, the, the other thing in answer to your question that jumped out at me was the, the facial recognition bands. These are, Yikes. These have been covered extensively by groups like... I think they're called Big Brother Watch in the UK. And the police will just randomly take...

They have these mobile... I don't even know what you want to call them. They're mobile facial recognition bands. They'll go out to a public street out of the blue and they'll set them up and just scan everybody that walks by. And the reason they're so problematic is because they'll put signs up at the end of the street that say, Hey, we're using facial recognition because legally they have to, they have to put those signs up so that you can quote unquote consent.

And the reason I put quote unquote is because there've been so many stories of people will like turn down the street and see that sign and And decide like, oh, I don't want to go down the street. So they'll turn and walk away. And the police will go follow that person and hunt them down and be like, why'd you walk away? What do you have to hide? What's your name? Show me your ID. And sometimes they'll even facial recognition them anyways.

And it's like, dude, it's not consent if you're going to chase me down the street and make me do it anyways. And so, yeah, I think they're going from like ten of those to like fifty of them. Five zero. It's completely insane. And those things scare the crap out of me. Yeah, my... My wife made a friend in the UK last year and she was like, we should go sometime. And I was like, never. No, I'm not going to the UK. It is a bit of a scary place.

I just saw we got a comment from a Wither lead here who said that these cases are hilarious that the involved people using them are too lazy to look back at what really AI is generated for them. And I think that's very true. And it's ridiculous, but I think it really highlights a huge problem that we see with AI right now, which is that I don't think people...

When, when we see AI used in these circumstances, it always needs to be done under like the oversight of a real person with experience and knowledge in this space, because AI will lie to you straight to your face without batting an eye because it can't, it doesn't know any better.

And you know, if you're going to use AI at all, the only way to do it is to, um, be aware of that and be able to catch AI and maybe maybe i don't know in terms of police but maybe some police officers can can do that right now um like more experienced ones they might be able to look at this and say like oh that's not quite right but what we're missing right now i think is all these younger people the new generations entering the workforce or in college right now who are really reliant

on ai they're going to be using ai more in their jobs and they aren't being trained on how to properly oversee AI.

I think we're losing a lot of that knowledge and we're putting a lot of trust in AI and that is simply not a tenable solution to this to this problem um we're not properly training anybody who's using these tools right now in my opinion to be aware of this in a way that makes sense we're kind of offloading a lot of jobs to ai right now when that is not something that ai can do it's never really going to be something that ai can do there are certainly like ai optimists who can

argue, and they may be right, that AI will be a big part of people's jobs in the future, but it'll always be under this human supervision. And it'll always be like a force multiplier, basically, but you have to You have to have the ability to recognize the problems with AI and control it. And people simply don't right now. I think that's a huge problem.

I think it's only going to become more and more of a problem as more people with real world experience retire and they don't pass that knowledge down to new trainees who are just doing everything through AI. So that worries me quite a bit about AI, not just in policing, but in pretty much any field where they're trying to apply it right now. And I think we really need to be aware of that and we need to do more about that to make it better.

Yeah, and that kind of goes back to what I said earlier about we have a low level of tech literacy. We have people who... You know, I just mentioned the issues that I have with Braves Leo, which somebody else said in the comments, like Leo's pretty good. And I agree. I'm very happy with the results. It cites its sources. So I always double check it. And I'm like, okay, let me make sure this actually says what you're telling me it says. But even then it's still, you know, it gets things wrong.

It repeats itself. It does things. And I don't understand how like, like the whole AI girlfriend thing, you know, like some people are really thinking like, oh, this, and I'm sure they realize it's software, but they're like, this software is sentience and really cares about me. And it's like, I have to imagine it has the same glitches that Leo does. And I don't understand how you can look at that and still think that this is the way to go.

And just that level of tech literacy to not understand what's going on under the hood and that it's just a prompt and that it's just, you know, autocorrect. And it's just, It scares me that, yeah, like you said, this is becoming such a – it's something that people are relying on for such important decisions. And on top of it, like you said, losing the ability to understand what it is, what it does, the limitations, things like that.

It's a tech literacy problem, but it's also, I think – like an intentional deception issue. And this almost ties back to what we were talking about social media earlier, where the way that AI companies, in particular OpenAI, I think, are treating their customers and are designing these models is becoming a legitimate public health hazard more than anything.

And that's the sort of thing where, again, we probably want to see more safeguards and more regulation and more thought put into how people interact with these things. Because I think people, there are so many people out there, I think, who naturally just want to humanize and anthropomorphize any technology they want. They're going to be sucked into these relationships like you were talking about, for example, or the advice that you're giving because it can sound so human.

And I think that playing on that fact to sell more subscriptions or to get more users I think is really, really dangerous. I think it is pretty much all of the problems that we've seen with algorithms and social media, but like ramped up to eleven, it's bad stuff that I think really needs to be thought of more carefully.

We're in a classic Silicon Valley move fast and break things moment, but the things that we're breaking right now are extremely serious, and that's not maybe the mentality we can take when we're rolling out this sort of technology nationwide or globally or whatever. It's crazy stuff. Yeah, for sure. All right. I think in a little bit here, we're going to talk about some of the popular discussions on the forum and start answering questions.

But first, we're going to talk about TikTok on the topic of public health crises and AI. Yeah, so TikTok, in case you guys haven't been paying attention, which for the record, I wouldn't blame you. I don't really pay much attention to it myself, if we're being honest. But TikTok was sold. Believe it or not, the deal finally went through. I know Trump's been trying to get that pushed through for a couple of years now.

And finally, I think the twenty second last week, it like officially the deal closed. It's all like the handoff has started. And I know the handoff has started because I overheard my wife and one of her friends saying that that TikTok was basically broken for like a week. Well, I think we've had a problem ourselves with our own shorts, right? We can't post. We haven't been able to post. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that.

Yeah. In case you guys are on TikTok, our shorts stopped posting there because of the technical issues they were having, and it couldn't post for some reason. And I actually went to go try and look for the live and see if there were any comments, and I can't even see the live, but that could be my phone. So, yeah. Who knows? But... Yeah, so anyways, TikTok sold.

And of course, when you open the app, you have to accept the terms of service, which I'm assuming you have to do even if you want to delete it now, which is a dark pattern that's not cool. But anyways, where we're going with this is there were some privacy changes to TikTok. Believe it or not, it got worse. If you are one of the people who didn't think it could, it did. So this article from Wired here talks about three of the biggest changes.

One of them is that TikTok is now capable of precise location tracking. Before this, it did not collect precise data. Yeah, precise location. So now if you are a TikTok user for whatever reason, like, you know, we post stuff there, make sure you double check and disable that. the precise location. I mean, disabled location in general, but especially precise location.

It now tracks your AI interactions, which TikTok is loaded with AI slop, but I guess there's also like AI tools and I don't understand what those are because I don't use them. Again, like I show up, I post a video, I check for comments, I leave, I don't hang out there. So I guess there are AI tools now that formerly did not fall under the privacy policy, but now TikTok has started tracking analytics and metadata from the usage of those tools.

And if you're a video viewer, you can see here, it says the old privacy policy are not explicitly mentioned, the new privacy policy. So that is one cool thing about this article. It shows you what the old privacy policy says and what the new one says. And then next up, not quite last, because there's one more, a couple more things we're going to talk about. But next up, TikTok has expanded its ad network. So So previously, I want to say, let me double check here.

So rather than using, well, you use the app TikTok. Yeah. So now basically they're going to be able to advertise to you in other places and use the data from TikTok to advertise to you in other places. And I would assume collect that data from other places to advertise to you on TikTok because I know that TikTok does have its own analytics tool like the Metapixel, Google Analytics. So yeah, that advertising has expanded.

Another privacy concern we should mention that I have seen making the rounds. Let me go ahead and change my tab I'm sharing here. This one comes from TechCrunch and it says, TikTok users freak out over apps immigration status collection. Here's what it means. I don't like this article. I'm gonna say that upfront. Because basically there's – I guess there's – again, don't hang out there so I wouldn't know.

But I guess there's a lot of videos going around TikTok about how TikTok now is collecting your immigration status, which is probably already being reported to ICE. I feel like I've reported on a story about that before, but I could be wrong. But anyways, according to this article, TikTok has always done that.

The difference is that now with the updated privacy policy, because of the way that laws in California are worded, specifically with the CCPA and California's Privacy Act, now they have to specifically disclose it. And it's – let me see if I can find it here. It's a very subtle, like, basically – Yeah, the policy specificity around types of sensitive information has to do with state privacy laws such as California's CPRA.

The latter, for instance, the CCPA, requires businesses to inform consumers when they collect sensitive information, which the law defines as including the following things. And there's a... Huge list of things here, precise location, genetic data, things that I think we would all agree are sensitive information. And it says, of note, citizenship and immigration status were specifically added to the category in twenty twenty three. Um, so basically it was probably always collecting this data.

It just didn't have to tell you that before. And the reason I don't like this article is just the author's tone. She takes this very like, guys, calm down. They were always doing this. It's not a big deal. Now they're just being more honest about it. And I really don't like that tone because it's like, no, it was bad then too. It's still bad. It was bad. This is not a calm down moment just because we know about it now. So yeah, that, uh, What's up? Sorry, my camera is apparently not working.

Maybe I have to fix this. It's all good. Well, the only thing I was going to say is I read this article and I was thinking the exact same thing. Like this TechCrunch article, they really framed this as like, hey, you know, it's actually not a big deal. They have to put this in their privacy policy because they're collecting it and it's the law. But that's not an excuse for them to collect it in the first place, obviously.

I see we saw a question in here, how did they determine immigration status? I think when it comes to this and also the other sensitive information that was mentioned in this article, like sexual life or sexual orientation, I think that that stuff is kind of being determined by algorithms, most likely. And it's probably a situation that we see... Similar to that stuff showing up in the privacy policy of cars and vehicles, for example, when we saw Mozilla's things.

A bit of it, I think, is going to be overzealousness. I think a lot of lawyers think we should put everything in there just to... cover our butts just in case something happens. But also I think they are collecting this information and they're inferring it based on not only the content you post, but also the content that you consume. And I think that they can probably get a pretty good idea of all of this information just based on the content you consume alone.

And so Yeah, ideally, they wouldn't be collecting any of that information at all. I definitely don't think that just because it's in state privacy laws, that's an excuse to put it in there. Ideally, the algorithm wouldn't be able to know that information. And once again, I think that's the theme of this episode. That's the sort of thing where the social media algorithms are overreaching and are very dangerous and need to be reined in a bit. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, it would be nice if they just said, here's how we determine that information. But it's probably so many different ways. Because like you said, some people disclose it. Some people upload a video where they're like, hey, I'm an immigrant here and I moved here in you know, but other people, yeah, it's probably a lot of signals. Like I would have to imagine if I moved out of the U S it would probably still be pretty easy to tell based on the way I spell things, the language.

I mean, there have been studies into like, you know, one of the most common examples is like soda versus pop, right. Depending on which phrase you use or Coke or some specific things, like depending on which word you use, it's a pretty good indicator. Like, Oh, you're probably from up North or you're probably from down South or something.

So That's just when you add up enough of those little signals, you can start to reveal things that may not be a hundred percent accurate, but they're probably right more often than they're wrong. Exactly. Like every single one of those pieces of data, it's like a Venn diagram for like, you just keep adding more circles. And at the end of the day, there's only going to be one person in the middle of all of those circles, right? You can get very specific with very broad data.

Dude, that is a really good way to put it. I like that. That was good. The next story in here I think answers Jordan's question in the chat. Does this affect the U.S. only or the whole world? Do you have that story pulled up on your screen here? Let me see. I do, yeah. So this is just kind of rounding off our trio of TikTok stories. So because TikTok – and I'll be honest. I don't even know the full answer to this story myself. I am very unclear.

Did – all of TikTok just get sold to a bunch of US and one UAE investment companies or did only part of it? It is only the American one. Only American TikTok is sold to this. The worldwide TikTok continues to be owned by ByteDance. But how this affects TikTok, I think, is still a good question and it's unclear. And I think that that is the point of this story here. It's like Canada is now looking into this.

I think especially because I would imagine just proximity to the US could get like some Canadian users lumped into this American version of the platform because of, I don't know, geolocation settings of their phone or whatever. I don't know how exactly this split works. The whole TikTok and especially like America, the American TikTok being its own thing doesn't make a lot of sense to me because it's unclear whether it federates with like the global TikTok. Do you see the same thing? content?

Is it just a different algorithm? Can people outside the US see American TikToks? I unfortunately don't know enough about TikTok. But anyways, going back to this story, and you can share more about it. I think that that is the question that Canada is asking right now. I think it's unclear to everyone. Yeah, you asked a whole bunch of questions that are scary. Yeah, and that's the headline for audio listeners. It says, Canada's privacy czar seeks answers on TikTok policy updates.

I don't know when we started calling everybody a czar. I don't know when that took off, and I don't like it, to be totally honest with you. But yeah, it's Canada's, oh my God, what are they? The Office of Privacy, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the OPC.

And yeah, like you said, I know this is way more common in Europe, but even here in the U.S., I don't know about nowadays, but historically, we've had areas, especially in the south, where people will be right on the border of Mexico and some state, and people will come back and forth. Maybe they live in Mexico, but they work in the US or vice versa. I don't know how that works, but I do know it's a thing, and I'm sure it was probably a thing in Canada.

I've known a few Canadians who, growing up – Went to school or maybe not went to school, but like went to church in Seattle and maybe not Seattle. That was probably pretty far down for them. But, you know, like they were back and forth pretty regularly and they were almost like dual citizens because they're just so close to the border that they have a lot of friends and connections in the other country. And so, yeah, Canada is rightfully so trying to understand with all this.

this sale going through now, what does that mean for Canadians? Will they get looped into this stuff? Will their privacy rights still be respected if they get looped in? Is TikTok going to make any effort to separate Canadian users and American users? Yeah, so we don't really have much on this story because this is just kind of the initial announcement that, hey, we're asking these questions. But I think they are very good questions. And like Jonah said, there's so many questions right now.

We're trying to figure out how any of this is going to work. What are people going to see? I know Trump said that he wanted the algorithm to be retrained once America bought it. So yeah, there's a lot of things that are kind of up in the air right now. I also, real quick, I appreciate the people in the comments when I asked about sodas. And somebody said, we call it soft drink. And someone else said, we call it by its chemical compounds. So thank you, guys.

But I believe Jonah is trying to fix his camera right now. And in a minute, we will start taking some viewer questions. And Jonah will return to us very shortly. Yes. Oh, he's back. He's back. All right. Did you have anything you wanted to add to the TikTok story or are you ready to move on to forum updates? No, I think I could point out this comment. Jordan just mentioned this really quick.

I don't think we talked about it too much, but I definitely have seen a lot of stories about how the algorithm is changing. There's definitely been allegations of the American version of TikTok now censoring posts that are critical of the American government and that sort of thing. Yeah, very concerning for Americans. I don't think that it was the right move to sell TikTok to Larry Ellison, of all people, and to Saudi Arabian private equity companies and all that stuff.

To be fair, they are Emirati, not Saudi Arabian. Oh, sorry. I did a little bit of digging. It turns out we're actually really good allies with the United Arab Emirates. so is china so you know it's like i don't like you but i like your best friend which i don't know if that makes you really mature or i don't know i i'm just asking questions yeah So yeah, as you were saying, we're going to get into questions that we see on our forum. We'll also get into questions that we've seen in the chat.

I know there's some questions. We've answered some questions as they've come up, but I've seen some questions that we've moved on and we'll get back to those. So stay tuned for that.

But yeah, in the meantime, let's talk about a couple top posts that we've seen in our community and on our forum. I think the... Big one for this week is, of course, it's Data Privacy Week, which is always an exciting time for all of us in privacy. Oh yeah, you have it pulled up here. We had a Data Privacy Day post, but basically on Wednesday the twenty-eighth, it was International Data Privacy Day.

Kind of just A yearly event that a lot of organizations in the privacy space, both on the business and consumer side, really try to focus on personal privacy improvements and switching to private alternatives and all of that sort of stuff. And so we've been posting some things throughout the week on our social media channels about Data Privacy Day and Data Privacy Week, ways that people can get into switching to more private alternatives.

And we talked a bit about on our forum, I think, as Nate looks through that, about how people are preparing for for twenty twenty six and how and. Yeah, what people are doing to be more private, which is super cool. So I don't know if there's any specific posts you wanted to highlight, but Well, I do love that hail privacy one. That cracks me up. But yeah, I mean, no, there's, I mean, it runs the gamut here, right? Like, let me scroll back to the top here.

You know, one person said one goal for twenty twenty six is to fully move over to ProtonMail, which, you know, whether it's Proton, Tudor, something else. What is it? Mailbox? Is that the other one we recommend? Um, whether it's one of those services, whichever one it's, it's, you know, it's no small feat to move email. And fortunately that is something you can do yourself.

You know, it's not like a signal, which thankfully signal is getting really common, but it's still, you have to have other people to talk to you. Right. We talked about that earlier with the WhatsApp story. Email, you can move that by yourself. Nobody's stopping you, but it is still a lot of work. And actually, uh, many years ago I moved from Yahoo to Gmail and I spent years still getting like this account that I forgot about that's went to Yahoo instead of Gmail.

So, you know, it's, it's, um, it's a lot of work and, uh, Yeah. One person gave the advice about the rabbit hole is very deep and it's understandable temptation to give up, but don't start with the low hanging fruit and work your way up the privacy tree one step at a time. So, um, yeah, they talked about smart TVs and they're trying to replace it with something that's a little bit more privacy friendly. Um, Yeah, they talked about, let's see, just kind of harm reduction.

I know that's a big thing for me is they said that their partner has certain disabilities. So unfortunately, they can't really get away from like a normal phone and stuff. But they said they're researching a way to run some old Linux computers and get the same television programming with more privacy. And so, yeah, pretty cool stuff.

We can get into some viewer questions. I think it's about that time. First one I saw in the chat, this was for you, Nate. What ThinkPad are you using right now and why? I am using a ThinkPad X-TX because it was a gift. And it was free and I run cubes on it. So I'm actually reading the chat from a cubes computer from, I have a little VM just for my work in privacy guides. And yeah, I mean, I like it. It's a little bit slow.

I think the processor is, I think this computer is from like, so, you know, this processor struggles a little bit, but yeah, but you know, it's not bad. And it's definitely like, I couldn't, I can never do any kind of video editing or gaming. And also, the screen's a little bit small. But it's great when I travel. I went to Europe late last year. And last week, you guys saw me with the, what did I call it earlier? I called my other computer something. It's like a billboard or something.

I don't know. But yeah, my other computer is massive and covers my whole face. And this guy's like fourteen inches. So it sat right in front of me on the plane. Nice and and nice and neat. And that was really, really handy. And it's a little slow, but it runs everything just fine. And it's great for surfing the web and writing. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm going to use it until the day it stops booting or something. So, yeah. Let's see. I'm looking through here.

We didn't seem to get any chats on the forum, which is unfortunate. There's a couple more chats in here. And yeah, if anyone's watching and has questions, this is a good time to leave them in the chat. Got another one here from Dread Pirate Roberts. Do you guys think that all of these bad laws like chat control, ID verification, facial recognition are done in bad faith to gain more control over the population or just bumbling politicians making these mistakes?

That one I think I did answer a bit, I guess, when I pulled up our recent tweet about that. I do think that the direction that a lot of Western countries are going in right now is towards more authoritarian practices and towards more control over their own citizens, which I think is really unfortunate. I think that that is a driving factor behind a lot of them. So, yeah, I don't think it's great. Did you have any additional thoughts on that, Nate?

I think in answer to the actual question, I think it's both because, you know, something that one of the podcasts I listen to, something the host says a lot is everybody's the hero of their own story, right? Like, nobody... nobody thinks they're the bad guy. Even, even when they are doing objectively evil things in their mind, it's like, well, this is a means to an end, right? Like this is going to make the world a better place in the long run.

And I have to literally kill people to do it, but you know, that's their logic. And I think there are a lot of politicians who want to protect children and just don't understand that this is not the best way to do it. You know, whether that's technical misunderstanding or whatever. And don't get me wrong. There's definitely a lot of politicians that are also just like, hey, man, whatever lines my pocket, whatever makes me more powerful, more prestigious, whatever.

I don't want to let those guys off the hook. But yeah, I mean, even the people who are genuinely doing this because they're like, oh, this will make me more powerful. I think in their head, they're like, this will make me more powerful and I can make the world a better place by my definition, which unfortunately means a lot of other people tend to suffer along the way. So, yeah. Yeah. One I did see here that I wanted to kind of touch on a little bit.

I think this was right before the one you shared. Computer's going slow here. Um, this captain haddock said, uh, surely mass level awareness and educational privacy is necessary. Majority public simply don't have the capacity to understand how privacy works in a technical sense. I disagree. Um, I mean, I don't, I don't want to get too pedantic here. I mean, people are smart, right? Well, to borrow the line from men in black, a person is smart. I will agree with that.

But, um, you know, I don't, I don't think anybody is incapable of learning this stuff, but I do agree that I, I think most people don't want to learn this stuff and it's very, um, Some of this stuff is really hard to wrap your head around, even for those of us who are interested in it and really passionate about it. So yeah, I mean, I just wanted to point that out. I think when we discredit people, that's not helpful personally. But yeah, I mean, people can learn. It's hard stuff to learn.

What else? We talked about regulation a little bit. we did talk about the slippery slope i know there's one user here who mentioned uh you know i see this as a stepping stone towards banning and restricted more of the internet i agree that kind of goes back to what i said about some nobody thinks they're the bad guy but sorry i see you were trying to pull one up there I was trying to pull up this question about VPN bans.

I realized they're probably not asking us, but other people in the chat, because that is our own tweet that blew up about VPN bans.

But yeah, it is interesting which of our posts become popular and which ones... not so much seems kind of random to me at times unfortunately but you know that's uh that's the problem with social media and these algorithms they're unpredictable and they're not really i don't think a lot of the times they get um our message out in front of people who are interested in reading it but sometimes it works out so social media Yeah. Here's one from culpable six, seven, five, zero.

And they said, do you think privacy has been getting harder and harder to achieve over the past couple of years, as well as getting more inconvenient? For example, I keep trying to use Movad browser, but there's no dark mode on most websites and it hurts my eyes, which is minor for me, but it impacts people. I gotta be honest. I think it's both. I think on the one hand we have a proliferation of of user-friendly tools like Signal, like the Brave browser, like ProtonMail.

And I realize that in a lot of cases, these tools still have shortcomings. Like I think... I'm a Tudor user, but I will objectively admit that I think Proton is the better user experience. I hate saying that. So where I'm going with that is I think we can all admit that a lot of these tools may still leave some things to be desired. Oh, right, where I was going with that. And even Proton is still missing things compared to Gmail or Google or Apple or Linux users.

Anyways, but on the other hand, you know, there's also like you mentioned you want to use Mulvad browser, which I think is perfectly legit. Mulvad browser is great. I have Mulvad. Mulvad is fantastic. And so on the one hand, it could be like, well, use Brave. Brave has dark mode, but maybe Mulvad has things like maybe you agree with their definition. Their privacy method of trying to make everybody look the same like the whole Tor browser thing does.

Maybe you just don't like Brave as a company, which is a totally valid take as well, in my opinion. It sucks that we don't have more really good options. When you're in mainstream technology, you have so many options that you can almost pick any of them in the work. And it sucks that we don't have that same freedom of choice with privacy issues. um, that we would as with the mainstream stuff.

But also the other thing is it's, I think when we're going up against the more high level threats, I definitely worry that our privacy is not as easily achieved there. Like, I think it's really easy to opt out of the, um, the, uh, targeted advertising, mass surveillance, automated stuff. It's when you get up into the more, you know, like, um, Oh, what was that company called? Augury, I think. This was like five years ago.

There was a company that was basically AI correlating traffic Years ago, this is probably actually why Mulvad rolled out data, that was their whole selling point was they would sell to the DOD and the military and law enforcement, like federal law enforcement. And they're like, yeah, we can even unmask people that are using VPNs. We can correlate the traffic and figure out where everybody's going. And pretty much your only defense was like a multi-hop VPN or Tor.

And I think when you're talking about data, That level of cutting edge, I think it's getting more competitive and more difficult. But also, that's probably, to be fair, just the cat and mouse of it. They invent that, Mulvan invents data. And then they invent something else, and Mulvan invents something else. So I don't know. I try to focus on what's within our ability to control and defend against. And I try to be grateful that we do have so many good options, even if they're not perfect.

Yeah. Really quick, not a question, but somebody said ByteDance is still keeping around twenty percent of the U.S.-based TikTok, but most of its U.S. ops are sold. Yeah. I don't know. It's the whole thing is like clearly not about getting ByteDance out of TikTok either. Like it's just a pure political thing going on. So I'm pretty sure that is true. I think I have I have heard that.

And like the fact that it's all working together and they're maintaining this this ownership, but they're also just like partially being taken over by all these US companies. It makes no sense. And I don't know. The TikTok thing is crazy because I don't know how much you got into this in your interview with Taylor Lorenz, but I know she's been talking about this lately. I know other people have pointed it out on social media.

The whole TikTok thing was started and really pushed for by the Democrats during Biden's administration.

And I think a lot of people like people in our position at the time were saying like, oh, if we let this happen, if we let the Democrats do this and push this forward this is going to obviously be misused by some government in the future and then lo and behold you know a few years later that is exactly what is happening right we I don't know it's that could be a whole political discussion but yeah it we're really I think that the American the state of America right now is just concerning

because um A lot of people are working towards like all of the problems that we're seeing now. It's not just like the current administration right now decided to do this, right? This was a long time in the making. It was a bipartisan effort to take over TikTok. And now we're seeing the results of that. And I think that that's really unfortunate. Exactly like Jordan, one of our producers just said, seems like they wanted to control the algorithm.

Yeah, that was pretty much the only goal with all this TikTok stuff, which... I don't know. It shouldn't be in control of any of these governments, you can definitely argue. It wasn't great in China's hands either, but we haven't improved the situation for sure. And this is, yeah, just to agree with you, this is why... I love the analogy of Kerry Parker from Firewall's Don't Stop Dragons. He refers to personal data as like radioactive waste.

And he's like, you want as little of it as possible because you can't handle it safely. And the stakes are too high if something goes wrong. And it drives me insane that America has such this attitude of like, well, it's okay if Facebook collects all this data. Nevermind that there's literally a Wikipedia page full of their data breaches and privacy scandals. But, you know, it's like, oh, it's okay when we do it, but when China does it, it's bad. And it's like, or...

We could just outlaw this entirely and it'll stop being a problem. I know this is really not the best example, but just because it's morally not okay. But I remember after Epstein's death, somebody did an investigation. Some reporter pulled all the location tracking data for all the cell phones that went in and out of his private island. And every single one of them that went back to Europe, as soon as they hit European airspace, the tracking data disappeared because of GDPR.

And it's like, okay, yes, not a great example because it's not great that bad people got away with bad things, but that proves that GDPR works. And it's like, why can't we do that? Why can't we just get rid of the data? And then China can't use it either. Nobody can use it because it's not there. And for the record, yes, I know there will always be espionage and people who flout the rules, but it'll drop so significantly.

And it would be at very least a huge step towards fixing the problem, if not a perfect solution. And it drives me insane. Absolutely. I think I don't want to bring up this whole the Epstein case and the morality of that situation. And like, obviously, you know, could somebody argue that GDPR is not really helping in that case? Maybe. I don't know. But yeah. I've talked about this. I don't remember in a post or another video a while ago.

Basically, I think in the privacy space, in the security space, something we have to keep in mind is that we see a lot of stories in the news like that one that you just talked about, for example, where we're talking about criminal activity and how either, you know, they had an OPSEC failure and they were caught because they weren't private enough, or how privacy laws are protecting criminals. You see both sides of this, right?

And that is the most abundant form of coverage about privacy in general. I think it's talking about how criminals are impacted because that's the most probably newsworthy stuff. But just like how you're talking about how it proves that GDPR is effective. Did GDPR maybe hinder this one specific case?

Yes. But all of that data that was being used, is very commonly behind the scenes and perfectly legally being used by all of these big tech companies and all of these other organizations to do all sorts of things that aren't catching criminals, like sell you ads or try and implement algorithmic pricing or trying to just influence your opinions in general, especially on social media. And GDPR also helps prevent all of those things.

But you don't hear about those stories in the news because it's not newsworthy right now, unfortunately. You only hear about these criminal cases. And so I just want to remind people I think because there is this association between privacy rights and internet freedoms and digital rights and all this stuff and criminals.

It's like just because you see it in the context of like all of these things being proven in court cases or in criminal trials or in like law enforcement investigations, that doesn't mean it's the only place it's happening. It just means that's the only place that the mainstream news media wants to write about it in. But you can look at all of these cases and you can extrapolate into like regular everyday life, how people can improve their privacy.

You can learn from the opposite mistakes of these criminals, but also how these laws can impact and protect you in other situations that aren't related to crime right gdpr protecting all of that data certainly hinders all of these bad things that i just talked about happening um even if it's not widely reported on and so i always just want to make that reminder because when we talk about criminal activity a lot i think that always comes up it's like why are you

just defending criminals and that's not that's not the case but they just have the best cases to learn from Yeah, it's like that whole, like you were saying, news by definition is out of the ordinary. Like we don't talk about how, you know, the ten thousand people today use graphene and went to work and went home and were completely normal law abiding citizens. It's you know, it's when it's, oh, this guy was arrested and he was using this weird phone that erases itself. And it's like, OK, cool.

Yeah. Like, obviously, that's interesting, but that's not reflective of reality. Yeah. Yeah. Let's get to our last few questions here. Here's one from DQ. Sorry, I think I clicked on one. Sorry, you can do yours first then. That's fine. Okay, sorry. Real quick. Yeah, Dread Pirate Roberts said, as more and more services block VPNs, are there any solutions to be able to have privacy without being blocked?

Again, VPNs aren't everything, but I think we will see like, I know Proton and I think Mulvad and I think a couple others also do. They have obfuscation to try and make it so you can use it and it won't be blocked. And I know when India started requiring VPNs to keep logs, they did some kind of trickery where they were able to move servers out of the country, but somehow address them in a way where they looked like they were in the country.

So basically Indian users could still use proton and be in India, quote unquote in India, but proton wasn't in India. So they didn't have to comply with the laws. I don't know. That's way over my head, but yeah, I think we'll still see, and you know, we'll still have things like tour now until they outlaw that too. I mean, I, It's a cat and mouse. I think we'll have options. But yeah, it will definitely get harder and be more difficult.

Just to reply to the residential IP aspect of this really quick, I want to say you're correct that the residential IP and proxy space is very shady.

I definitely wouldn't support it even if it does work because a lot of these residential IP proxy brokers, they are basically running criminal organizations and they are tricking people into installing malware on their computers or tricking people into buying like these cheap Amazon or not Amazon but Android TV boxes on Amazon and other marketplaces to connect to their networks and that's how they get all these residential IPs right and funding those operations it puts a lot of like regular

people in danger because like law enforcement goes after those people all the time because they're hosting like basically an exit node for a VPN that's handling all sorts of crazy traffic right and it's Not an ideal situation for anyone involved, so it's definitely not something that I would pursue personally if I were you. I would avoid the whole residential IP space because it's pretty much all malware that's driving that, and that's not something that should be really supported, I think.

Real quick on a personal note, Dread Pirates Roberts said there's a documentary from Vice that shows the facial recognition capabilities in China six years ago, and the people I've shown it to have been very receptive. Please send that my way because I want to watch that. That sounds cool. All right, what's the next one? I think you had a question lined up. I think this will be our last question of the show here, but this is from DQ. They asked, have you come across the OPSEC Bible by Nihilist?

First of all, just stopping there, have you heard of this? Because I actually have not, unfortunately. I'm not sure if you're familiar. I don't think so. I want to say it sounds familiar, but I could be making that up. If I've heard of it, I've definitely never read it. Okay, that's definitely something I will have to look into.

But continuing your message, I'd love to hear your thoughts on its extreme all-or-nothing privacy philosophy, especially since the guide criticizes the closed-source recommendations that appear on privacy guides. It seems to push a very different approach from the more mainstream privacy advice you usually promote. And just based on that...

That is a pretty common thing that we see with a lot of privacy guides out there, especially ones that are published anonymously or are catered towards a more hardcore audience. It's definitely a different audience than we're going for. I think that the biggest thing that we try to do at Privacy Guides is try to find all of these tools in different categories that can really raise the bar for privacy as a whole. We can't solve every problem at once.

And I think this ties into a lot of the things that we were talking about earlier in the show as far as convincing people to switch from WhatsApp to Signal, for example. People are using things that are crazy for your privacy and extremely privacy invasive. People are using Windows, for example, which I think is not something people should be doing in twenty twenty six. Like that's the state that most people who aren't who haven't heard of any of this are are at right now.

And so switching I mean, even switching from Windows to Mac OS is not ideal and it's not like you know if somebody comes up to me it's like what's the most private operating system mac os is far behind what the actual like better ones are by by a wide margin but compared to what people are coming from which is Windows in this case, it's a huge advantage and people are more apt to switch to it.

And I think that encouraging people switching to, in some cases, some proprietary systems over time is better than the situation that I think privacy guides like the OPSEC Bible in this case probably I personally think the outcome of a guide like that, if I put it in the hands of a normal person, is that they will not follow any of the advice. Because we see this even in our forum, but definitely less so recently. And we've made some changes to improve this.

But it's a very common complaint, I think, in the privacy community where people feel burned out because they... need to switch like all of these things all at once and they feel the need to switch like completely cut off less private alternatives or things that their friends are using and they feel socially isolated and that's not really the goal of being private like privacy i think um gives like, it's a right that you should have, you should be able to exercise this,

but it's not like you need to be completely private in all aspects of your life. Some people still need to, everyone still needs to have a social life and interact with other people and that sort of thing.

And yeah, at the end of the day, When we recommend something like one password, for example, it's because we've looked at that and we've decided that compared to what other people are using, which is either no password manager at all or something like LastPass, which has notoriously a ton of data breaches and security issues, solid proprietary tools that respect your privacy relatively well are acceptable to us. And we would rather people switch to that than not follow the advice at all.

And for people who are looking for more advanced or more customized recommendations or for any of that, I think we have the form which is going to be able to answer those sorts of questions for people who have moved beyond the general advice that we have on our site and who don't need an approach that we take for the general population where we try to balance privacy, security, and user experience. And you can really hone in on a good situation for you through these discussions.

And I think that that's the value of the privacy guides community form that none of these guides are going to be able to provide. Because at the end of the day, all of this tailored advice is going to be better in general than any of these guides, to be honest. So that's my thoughts on that. Yeah, you kind of said what I'm thinking, so I'll keep this quick. But I think in addition to – y'all are going to get tired of hearing me say the words harm reduction.

In addition to the harm reduction mindset, which I'm a huge, huge fan of, I think there's also the idea that two things can be real. I really don't like the idea – or I don't like the narrative that some people push where it's like, if you're not doing privacy my way and you're not going a hundred percent, then you're wrong. Because the fact of the matter is they're wrong too.

Like the only way to really be private is to just like throw away your computer, never get on the internet, go live in a cabin in the woods, which I would like to reiterate. That's not foolproof either because they did find Ted Kaczynski. So yeah, I don't know. I really reject that whole extreme all or nothing. This is the only way to do it. I think it's really arrogant. I think it's really disrespectful.

Again, I want to reiterate, I haven't read this Bible, so I'm not passing judgment on nihilists. I'm just in general. I think when people do that, it's really... I don't know, like Jonah was saying, like people have, I've seen people look at certain guides and websites and just be like, yeah, I'm not doing, and straight up say that, like, I'm not doing that. And I would rather people make small steps that do something, even if nothing.

And I think some people, not all of them, but I think some people will take those small steps and go, oh, that wasn't so bad. That was actually kind of fun. What else can I do? And they'll go above and beyond. Like, I don't need to be using cubes. That is not part of my threat model. I like it. I think it's fun. So, and I think kind of going back to what I said about like two things can be real.

I think it's great that there are these really hardcore guides For the people who want to be hardcore or even like when Michael Basil was doing his podcast, I would listen all the time. And I still read his books, his extreme privacy books, because I like the thought experiment. That's what I'm looking for. I like the thought experiment. I like the like knowing how deep the rabbit hole goes and just knowing what the options are.

Even though ninety percent of the time I walked away going, I'm not going to do any of that. But it's really cool to know that that's a thing, and it's really interesting, and it's fun to learn about. And, you know, some people would do it, and there were some things that I would listen to and be like, oh, I think I might want to try that, actually. So I don't think it's a bad thing that this stuff is out there.

I think it's really cool, as long as they're not adapting that attitude of like, well, this person's wrong. I mean, unless somebody's actually wrong, then like, hey, please, if you think we're wrong, open a thing on the forum. Like, let us know. But... It's, you know, it's respecting that there's different priorities, there's different threat models, there's different resources.

Like, you know, somebody posted in the forum recently talking about they disagree with our Android recommendations because not everybody can, lives in a country where they can get a pixel or not everybody can afford one. And, you know, that's true of these more extreme privacy things too. So, yeah. Yeah. Again, haven't read it, but if he's coming at it from the perspective of like, this is how I think you can get the maximum level of privacy, then great.

I think that's really cool that there are those guides, but I don't think that invalidates things like privacy guides where we say, this is probably good enough for most people. And I think both of those things can exist. And DQ, thanks for sharing in the chat. I'll link to this. I want to reiterate, nothing that I was saying before is any judgment of this guide in particular, because again, I haven't read it. Neither of us have read it. I was going to say, he might have been talking to me.

It certainly could have... Good advice. Right. Uh, and, and I'll definitely check it out. So thanks again for sharing. Um, I just want to, that's, that's just my experience based on other guides and based on like what you, how you described it. Um, I I've definitely seen guys like that where yes, that it's probably not the target audience that we are trying to go for.

Um, I kind of have a philosophy that like being accessible and also sort of being like a more public face when it comes to all of this, like obviously do this under my name, for example, and not a pseudonym like this. I think that that is a difference in approach and it reaches different people. And I think that guides like that and projects like Privacy Guides both serve their own purpose.

But yeah, for anything more than like just the basic stuff that we have on our site, that is the point of our form. Because, yeah, I really don't know if any of these guides can really be everything for everyone, right? But I'm sure for a certain group of people, that guide could be very good. And I will definitely take a look at it because I like to read other guides out there. Yeah, I produced some of the articles on the website. I didn't go straight to the Bible. I went to the Root website.

Some of it is pretty extreme, like which countries don't have extradition laws. Which, no offense to this guy, but if that's my threat model, I'm not going to trust a random website on the internet. I'm going to talk to an actual lawyer. But then others were like, how to get started with ITP, which I don't really have strong opinions on ITP, but I don't know. I'll peruse it. I'll check it out later this weekend. Some light reading for the weekend.

Yes. Yes. Well, Nate, I think this probably about wraps things up here. As a quick reminder to everyone, PrivacyGuides is a nonprofit. We're dedicated to protecting our digital rights. If you want to support the show and our mission, a donation at privacyguides.org would be much appreciated. I want to thank Nate for joining me this week. Before we wrap up this broadcast here,

I want to deliver a quick message as the program director of Privacy Guides about the current state of the United States of America. As a Minnesotan and a resident of the city of Minneapolis myself, this is a very important issue to me. We're only one month into twenty twenty six right now.

And already this year, ICE agents of the federal government of the United States are responsible for the extrajudicial killings of two American citizens right here in my city for exercising their constitutional rights. This happened as part of a larger ICE campaign to terrorize my neighbors and this country, which is a campaign that I know many Minnesotans protested in force last week, and I know many American patriots are protesting today.

Our mission at Privacy Guides has always been to support the right of privacy for all people, regardless of political views or the country that people live in. It's also our mission to speak out against government overreach, particularly when it comes to surveillance and especially when government agencies are being pitted against the very taxpayers and citizens that they are meant to protect and serve.

Here in the United States, that's meant recently speaking out against the Democrats who aim to increase surveillance and censorship through bills like COSA or the planned repeals of Section two thirty. But now against republican certainly in our government, who are weaponizing the state surveillance systems and law enforcement bodies like ice to target their perceived political enemies and immigrant members of our communities, without respect to their legal residency status or any due process.

this weaponization of ice by the trump administration is not happening in a vacuum it's fueled by the very surveillance data and the lack of digital boundaries that we have been fighting against for years laws which were enacted within my lifetime like the patriot act and loopholes like the continued lack of regulations against commercial data brokers which allow the government to bypass the fourth amendment entirely by purchasing our own GPS and social media

data from tech companies to map out our neighborhoods for raids. Minneapolis has also become the testing ground for invasive and inaccurate facial recognition apps like Mobile Fortify, where AI glitches, just like we talked about in this episode, can lead to unlawful detentions of innocent people and the sort of state-sponsored surveillance that took the lives of Renee Nicole Goode and Alex Peretti.

In times of overreach, our greatest defense is our community and our refusal to be intimidated into silence. And I've seen how powerful that this can be firsthand. The reality is that how ICE is operating within the borders of the US is unjustifiable.

So we here recognize the significance of this unprecedented situation, and we stand alongside everyone who's protesting in support of the protection of our neighbors and for American rights, which is something that I think all Americans should support. Thank you all for tuning in. I hope you all have an excellent weekend.