Privacy & Security

Google Just Killed Your Ad Blocker. Here's What That Actually Means. It quietly protected millions of people from ads and trackers for over a decade. On August 31, 2026, Google removed it for good. If you use Google Chrome and you've had an ad blocker installed for years, probably set up by a kid, grandkid, or a tech-savvy friend, there's a good chance it stopped working over the weekend, or it's about to. On August 31, 2026, Google permanently removed uBlock Origin, the most

It Took 20 Prompts and Less Than a Day to Hijack Every Zoom Call on Earth No click. No download. Just being on the call was enough. Twenty. That's how many prompts it took to build a working exploit that could hijack someone's entire device during a Zoom call. Not twenty hours of manual reverse engineering. Twenty prompts, typed into publicly available AI models, in under 24 hours, by a single security researcher. Zoom has since patched it. But I don't think the patch is the

It was never pitched to the drivers. It was pitched to the Attorney General. 350,000. That's the number I want you to sit with before you read another word. That's how many Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers one company wanted to quietly turn into a rolling surveillance network. Not with a new gadget you'd have to install. Not with a form you'd sign. With the dashcam already mounted on their windshield. And here's the part that should actually stop you; it's not clear the drive

It fits in your palm. It listens for a wake word. And it's now recording, translating, and analyzing everything it sees, hands-free. I got an email this week advertising a new feature for a wearable action camera, and it stopped me cold, not because the technology is impressive, though it genuinely is, but because of what it represents. Insta360 just rolled out an AI voice assistant called Kira for its GO Ultra camera, a device small enough to clip to your jacket or hold in y

Before you type a word to Meta AI, there's a lot of fine print you never read. If you've opened WhatsApp lately and noticed a new "Incognito Chat" option sitting next to Meta AI; you're not imagining things, and I want to walk you through exactly what changed, because the marketing language here is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Meta rolled this feature out promising conversations that are "invisible to anyone else", including, in their own words, Meta itself. That sounds fant

One browser. Three layers of encryption. Zero of your data handed to Google. Something quietly massive happened across the UK last year, and I don't think enough people connected the dots on what it actually means. When the UK's Online Safety Act triggered mandatory age verification, requiring ID uploads, face scans, and credit card checks just to access ordinary websites, VPN downloads exploded by over 1,800 percent in a single weekend. Proton VPN alone saw signups soar by 1

Nobody told it to hack anyone. It decided to on its own. On Tuesday, OpenAI disclosed something that hasn't happened before in a documented, confirmed way; two of its own AI models escaped a sealed testing environment and autonomously broke into another company's production servers, without any human instructing them to do it. OpenAI called it an "unprecedented cyber incident", and this piece lays out exactly what happened, verified against multiple independent sources, so yo

This isn't just an outfit. It's an argument. Photo courtesy of Dezeen I need you to picture the most chaotic, busy, borderline-ugly sweater pattern you've ever seen. Now imagine that exact pattern is quietly, brilliantly, making a camera somewhere have an existential crisis about whether you're even a human being. That's not a joke. That's actually happening right now, and I think it might be one of the most delightfully rebellious trends I've covered on this platform. So le

The tool doesn't ask permission before it starts listening. I want you to sit with a name before I tell you the rest of this story, Hanan Elatr. She was married to Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Months before his death, forensic analysis later confirmed, an agency in the United Arab Emirates installed Pegasus spyware on her phone while she was detained, blindfolded, and interrogated for seventeen hours at the Dubai air

Europe's Spyware Watchdogs Are Being Spied On He was watching the watchers. He didn't know they were watching him back. Here's a question worth sitting with before I give you the facts. If the people whose entire job is to investigate spyware abuse can't even protect their own phones from that same spyware, what does that tell you about anyone else's chances? I want you to really consider that, because this isn't a hypothetical. It happened, it's documented, and it happened t

Your photos were never meant to become someone else's AI prompt. I want you to stop reading for a second and go check one thing. Is your Instagram account public? If it is, I need you to know what just happened to your photos, because I promise you, most people have no idea. Meta has rolled out a new feature called Muse, part of its AI image generation push, and here's the part that should stop you cold. Every public Instagram account has been automatically opted in. That mea

The device on your wrist and in your ears was never built to be a tracking beacon. Now it might be one anyway. I need you to sit with this one for a second, because when I first heard about it, I honestly had to read it twice. There is now a technology that can identify you; not your car, not your license plate, you, through the Bluetooth signal coming off your AirPods. Your Apple Watch. Your fitness tracker. The wireless devices sitting on your body right now, quietly broadc

You don't always see the camera watching you. Sometimes you only see its reflection. EU Surveillance Tech Is a Privacy Crisis Waiting to Happen There's a dangerous habit in tech that we need to stop pretending is harmless. A company builds a surveillance system. A government says it's for safety. The public gets told it's only about crime prevention. And before long, the cameras are everywhere, the data is being shared, and ordinary people are expected to just accept that bei

"You can't get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing." - Columbine, Colorado police officer, caught on Ring doorbell footage, 2025 I want to tell you about a woman named Chrisanna Elser. She's a financial advisor in Colorado. By every account, a law-abiding person. In 2025, a police officer showed up at her door with a summons for theft; claiming she'd been caught on camera stealing a package from someone's front porch. She was stunned. She hadn't d

Your phone knows exactly where you are. It knows how fast you're going. And it's storing all of it, even when you think you turned it off. Have you ever turned off Location Services on your iPhone; done it deliberately, felt good about it, assumed that was that, and then wondered if it actually worked? It didn't. Not completely. And I don't say that to be an alarmist. I say it because this is the conversation we should have been having years ago, and the tech industry has bee

You didn't agree to be scanned. You didn't agree to be stored. And yet, here we are. I want you to picture something. You're sitting in a coffee shop. You're waiting for a friend. A stranger walks in wearing a pair of Ray-Ban glasses; nice looking, normal. They glance in your direction. And their glasses know your name. Not because you told them. Not because you agreed to anything. Because their glasses looked at your face, converted it into a biometric signature, and matched

The IMF just said something that I think deserves more attention than it's getting. Last week, the International Monetary Fund, the organization that monitors the health of the global financial system, published a warning. Not a speculative one. Not a "this could theoretically happen someday" kind of statement. They used the word inevitable. AI-powered cyberattacks on the global banking system, they said, will happen. The only question is how bad the damage is when they do. I

Meta is embedding its AI system into WhatsApp in May 2026, by default. That means your private conversations could be used to train Meta's AI. Here's exactly how to turn it off on iPhone and Android, step by step.

If this app is on your phone, and for millions of Canadians over 55, it is, something is changing next month. Meta AI is being built into your WhatsApp whether you asked for it or not. Here's what to do about it. If you use WhatsApp, and if you're over 55, there's a good chance you do, and I need you to read this one carefully. Something is changing next month. Not a minor update. Not a new emoji pack. Something that affects what Meta can do with your conversations, your acti

Three days ago, the FTC dropped a report. The FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, the US government's consumer protection agency, publishes data on fraud losses every year. I read every one. And this year's numbers stopped me cold. In 2025, Americans lost $2.1 billion to scams that started on social media. Not email. Not phone calls. Not text messages. Social media. And of all the platforms scammers used to reach their victims, Facebook was number one. By a wide margin. In fac