tl;dr:
ads are everywhere and aren’t so fun everyone is trying to track you (for better or worse) Pi Hole is awesome; it’s a network-level adblocker and runs on a Raspberry Pi streisand gives you a quick way to set up a censorship-resistant and secure server running a number of VPNs/proxies (OpenVPN, Shadowsocks, Wireguard, and more!) you can combine them to get a secure & resilient connection with network-level ad-blocking everywhere you go (iOS/android, linux, mac OS, windows, etc.

It’s always difficult admitting you’re wrong. But sometimes, it’s exactly what you have to do in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So, today, I admit that I was wrong about Google, Facebook, and surveillance capitalism in general being toxic for our human rights and democracy.
You see, it simply cannot be true given how they are endorsed by some of the most well-respected groups and organisations in the world.

A new start-up company called eelo wants to provide you with an alternative version of Android. What makes this different than the version of the mobile OS that you are familiar with is that this version is de-Google-ized. The goal is to allow users to have more privacy than they currently do with the Google Play Services version of the open source OS...

With the aim of informing sound policy about data sharing and privacy, we
describe successful re-identification of patients in an Australian
de-identified open health dataset. As in prior studies of similar datasets, a
few mundane facts often suffice to isolate an individual. Some people can be
identified by name based on publicly available information. Decreasing the
precision of the unit-record level data, or perturbing it statistically, makes
re-identification gradually harder at a substantial cost to utility. We also
examine the value of related datasets in improving the accuracy and confidence
of re-identification. Our re-identifications were performed on a 10% sample
dataset, but a related open Australian dataset allows us to infer with high
confidence that some individuals in the sample have been correctly
re-identified. Finally, we examine the combination of the open datasets with
some commercial datasets that are known to exist but are not in our possession.
We show that they would further increase the ease of re-identification.

In 2016, doctors’ identities were decrypted in Australian medical records. Now, a University of Melbourne team finds patients’ records can also be re-identified

The NSA leaker's latest project aims to secure your computer—and you—from not just digital but physical attacks.

Sources disclosed troubling privacy practices at a Ring office in Ukraine.

Nick Winke, a photographer in the Pacific northwest, was perusing internet forums when he came across a complaint that alarmed him: On certain Samsung Electronics Co. smartphones, users aren’t allowed to delete the Facebook app.

Welcome to 2019 where we learn Facebook is the new crapware. Sorry #DeleteFacebook, you never stood a chance. Yesterday Bloomberg reported that the scandal-beset social media behemoth has inked an unknown number of agreements with Android smartphone makers, mobile carriers and OSes around the world…

In a lawsuit on Thursday, the city attorney said tracking was used not just for local forecasts but also for commercial purposes like targeted marketing.

The overall number of guests affected by the hacking, in which Chinese intelligence is the leading suspect, declined to 383 million. But the passport data is critical to intelligence agencies.

Facebook routinely tracks users, non-users and logged-out users outside its platform through Facebook Business Tools. App developers share data with Facebook through the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK), a set of software development tools that help developers build apps for a specific operating system. Using the free and open source software tool called "mitmproxy", an interactive HTTPS proxy, Privacy International has analyzed the data that 34 apps on Android, each with an install base from 10 to 500 million, transmit to Facebook through the Facebook SDK.

The long read: We knew that being connected had a price – our data. But we didn’t care. Then it turned out that Google’s main clients included the military and intelligence agencies

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, an investigative reporter for The Times, explains how reporters discovered some of the information mobile apps collect.

Smartphone apps track a staggering amount of data about our whereabouts every day. That data has become a hot commodity.

Windows 10 collects an “Activity History” of applications you launch on your PC and sends it to Microsoft. Even if you disable or clear this, Microsoft’s Privacy Dashboard still shows an “Activity History” of applications you’ve launched on your PCs.

Microsoft baffles Windows 10 users by apparently collecting data about recently opened websites and apps when users have opted against sharing that information.