privacy
Joshua Morris (opens on the publisher’s site)
joshuamorris.info
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Judge Sara Hill called Flock-style ALPR history indiscriminate mass surveillance and suppressed a warrantless month of travel data.
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Google will keep ChromeOS updates through mid-2034 while moving many devices to Googlebook OS. That is not the ten years of ChromeOS advertised since 2023.
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Safe / Not Safe checks a PostgreSQL migration in the browser and answers SAFE, NOT SAFE, or NEEDS CONTEXT, teaching the lock better than a best-practices list.
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A New Mexico jury found nearly 44 million Facebook privacy violations after other states released those claims inside a child-safety settlement.
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A Flock installer called police on a reporter filming in public—the discomfort of being watched that millions feel about license plate readers.
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Apple Watch Series 12 Audio Intelligence listens inside a Secure Exclave. The architecture is not conventional recording, but Siri Recap still raises hard social questions.
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California lawmakers unanimously passed an amendment exempting most open-source operating systems from the Digital Age Assurance Act—a needed correction to a law written for platforms, not forks.
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LG monitors can trigger Windows to install manufacturer software that later advertised McAfee—exposing a trust boundary between hardware identity and automatic app distribution.
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The New York Times and Slashdot on Samuel Tunick—GrapheneOS duress at CBP Atlanta, a § 2232(a) felony, and whether using a privacy tool during a disputed search can itself become the crime.
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A leaked Apple demo of camera-equipped AirPods using Visual Intelligence raises two products at once: inconspicuous computer-vision sensors, and a potentially powerful assistive wearable—if the privacy model is designed before the hardware ships.
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Flock Safety’s new privacy guardrails—seven-day default retention, mandatory Audit Assistance, case codes, and auto lockouts—arrive after years of abuse cases, contract suspensions, and ACLU skepticism that this is PR, not reform.
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Littleton, Massachusetts says Flock Safety reactivated license plate cameras the town had deactivated for privacy review—without notice—raising whether municipalities actually control the surveillance systems they pay for.
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Privacy researchers found three WebKit paths—DNS prefetch, WebAuthn related origins, and WebTransport—that can bypass browser proxy settings and iCloud Private Relay, revealing real IPs even when ordinary page loads are relayed.
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GrapheneOS responds to prosecution involving its duress-password feature by stating that creating and using the OS is legal and constitutionally protected—arguing privacy tools need funding, legal durability, and a nonprofit structure that can protect contributors when the software becomes inconvenient.
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Cory Doctorow argues the real problem with data brokers is that they may collect and sell personal information by default—and that California’s DROP platform, while a real improvement, still puts the burden on the person being cataloged.
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Petals distributes enormous language-model layers across volunteer peers so people can run Llama, Mixtral, Falcon, and BLOOM without hundreds of gigabytes of local GPU memory—arguing the idea is fascinating, but public swarms need much stronger privacy and trust before carrying anything sensitive.
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Joseph Cox reports Apple took a year to fully fix a Hide My Email flaw Tyler Murphy disclosed in June 2025—only after 404 Media’s coverage—arguing a paid privacy feature should not need public pressure before customers are protected.
Developer Musings (opens on the publisher’s site)
joshghent.com
Josh Can Help (opens on the publisher’s site)
www.joshcanhelp.com
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It feels more important now than ever to take back some control and add a layer of privacy and protection where I can. This is how I'm doing that.