Tootfinder

Kmart’s use of facial recognition to tackle refund fraud unlawful, Australia's Privacy Commissioner finds
https://www.oaic.gov.au/news/media-centre/18-kmarts-use-of-facial-recognition-to-tackle-refun…

Kmart’s use of facial recognition to tackle refund fraud unlawful, Privacy Commissioner finds
The Privacy Commissioner has found that Kmart breached Australians’ privacy by collecting their personal and sensitive information through a facial recognition technology system.

Cory Doctorow gets it – Time to download privacy apps now
The Dictator/Fascist/Authoritarian playbook is well understood. Surveillance is a key part of the effort to dominate and punish individuals who engage in legal dissent or opposition. The recent decision by Apple and Google to remove the ICEBlock application from their app stores is a good example of how this control plays out.
Our mobile phones are the main platform that we use to send and receive text and email messages.…

Mark Zuckerberg and other executives will pay $190M to the company in a settlement with shareholders who brought suit to recover damages from the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal that reverberated out of Trump’s first term. Ensures that he, Sandberg, Andressen, Thiel, et al shielded from deposition, trial. https://<…

Zuckerberg, Meta directors agree to $190 million settlement of shareholder privacy case
WILMINGTON, Delaware (Reuters) -Mark Zuckerberg and current and former leaders of Meta Platforms agreed to pay the company $190 million to resolve...

California reaches a $50M settlement with Meta to resolve claims that Facebook users were misled about their ability to limit who could see personal details (The San Francisco Standard)
https://sfstandard.com/2025/12/19/facebook-users-dec…

Meta, California agree to settle Facebook privacy case
Third parties harvested personal data even though the company claimed to offer privacy, a lawsuit says.

»The Privacy Theater of Hashed PII:
A 2020 MacBook Air can hash every North American phone number in four hours«
Good article that clearly shows that only hashing alone is not yet data safe. That's where HMAC belongs at the SHA-2 min. but also not to save passwords and the same.
🤷 https://

The Privacy Theater of Hashed PII
It takes a 2020 Macbook Air four hours to hash every North American phone number

from my link log —
How we made our SaaS homepage cookie-free.
https://blog.leavemealone.app/no-more-cookies/
saved 2020-11-03 https://

How We Made Our SaaS Homepage Cookie-Free for Better Privacy
Discover how we made our SaaS homepage cookie-free, enhancing privacy and streamlining the user experience.

As scientists show they can read inner speech, brain implant ‘pioneers’ fight for neural data privacy, access rights https://therecord.media/neural-data-privacy-brain-implants

Heute auf dem Heimweg zum ersten Mal den Anti-Paparazzi-Loop-Schal (https://urban-privacy.com/products/anti-paparazzi-loopschal-i-bio-premium-unisex-schlauchschal-mit-reflektierenden-print-gegen-blitzlic…

Panel asking what nostr doesnt fix?
Relay centralisation could enable censorship, and the UI asking users to manage private keys is tricky.
Could one app become a centralisation choke point? They say no. Agreed. Nostr has very good migration here, if one app goes bad it's easy to move.
Privacy is not solved here, since almost all content is public anyway, by design. But since so users have public keys, it's a step towards enabling privacy. Agreed, and at least clients won't generally spy on every mouse click and scroll pause.
No mention of the thing I think most important, that censorship resistance means poor moderation that means bullying, spam, and harassment. That's tricky to solve I think. The fediverse model seems more suitable for good moderation.
#nostr #nostrshire

Wie zu erwarten war, geht #Arduino durch den Verkauf an #Qualcomm nun den Bach runter. Der neue Besitzer hat AGB und Datenschutz geändert. Die Arduino-Plattform ist somit wohl nicht mehr unter freier Lizenz. Auch erhält Qualcomm eine Nutzungsgenehmigung für alle hochgeladenen Materialien …

Google is phasing out its Privacy Sandbox technologies; the initiative was launched in 2019 to develop privacy-protecting tech to replace third-party cookies (Kendra Barnett/Adweek)
https://www.adweek.com/media/googles-privacy-sandbox-is-officially-dead/

Google’s Privacy Sandbox Is Officially Dead
The elimination of many remaining Privacy Sandbox APIs come six months after third-party cookies got a reprieve in Chrome.

FPF Releases Issue Brief on New CCPA Regulations for Automated Decisionmaking Technology, Risk Assessments, and Cybersecurity Audits
https://fpf.org/blog/fpf-releases-issue-brief-on-new-cc…

Utility-based Privacy Preserving Data Mining
Qingfeng Zhou, Wensheng Gan, Zhenlian Qi, Philip S. Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15755 https://arxiv.org/pdf/…

Utility-based Privacy Preserving Data Mining
With the advent of big data, periodic pattern mining has demonstrated significant value in real-world applications, including smart home systems, healthcare systems, and the medical field. However, advances in network technology have enabled malicious actors to extract sensitive information from publicly available datasets, posing significant threats to data providers and, in severe cases, hindering societal development. To mitigate such risks, privacy-preserving utility mining (PPUM) has been …

Charlottesville, VA is the latest city with smarter elected leaders than San Francisco (where we continue to double down on partnering with ICE-collaborating Flock Security).
https://www.29news.com/2025/12/17/charlottesville…

Charlottesville ends Flock camera pilot program over privacy concerns
The decision comes after months of concern from city council about data privacy.

I don't know what to say :mortysmile:
Don't buy smartshit~
#smartshit #privacy
@…

»How to Stay Anonymous on the Internet in 2026 (Practical Guide to Online Privacy)
With the right tools and habits, you can dramatically reduce how much of your data is exposed and browse the internet far more.«
This article is not wrong but in my opinion very superficial. This is certainly a good introduction for people who are starting to move more safely on the Internet.
🔐

How to Stay Anonymous on the Internet in 2026 (Practical Guide to Online Privacy)
With the right tools and habits, you can dramatically reduce how much of your data is exposed and browse the internet far more anonymously.

My slides and a video of my talk "Grow your [engineering] brand while putting privacy first" are available on my blog: https://talkweb.eu/openweb/4500/
If you want a funny, but useful talk on that topic, reach out!

Oh great... thanks Cardmarket 😔
"With the change to our Privacy Policy, we are introducing an AI-powered assistant."

Google is phasing out its Privacy Sandbox technologies; the initiative was launched in 2019 to develop privacy-protecting tech to replace third-party cookies (Kendra Barnett/Adweek)
https://www.adweek.com/media/googles-privacy-sandbox-is-officially-dead/

Google’s Privacy Sandbox Is Officially Dead
The elimination of many remaining Privacy Sandbox APIs come six months after third-party cookies got a reprieve in Chrome.

hey. hey do you know the `-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----` thing you see in files with key material? the files whose name ends in .pem? do you know what .pem stands for?
i just learned it stands for "Privacy-Enhanced Mail" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy-Enhanced_Mail

The Privacy Paradox
Hadn’t realised that this short piece on privacy by Al Jazeera that I contributed to had aired. Apparently did mid August :)
https://www.aljazeera.com/video/aljazeerauntangles/2025/8/13/the-privacy-paradox

The Privacy Paradox
We claim to value privacy, but surrender it daily, often without knowing.

Query-Efficient Locally Private Hypothesis Selection via the Scheffe Graph
Gautam Kamath, Alireza F. Pour, Matthew Regehr, David P. Woodruff
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16180 htt…

Query-Efficient Locally Private Hypothesis Selection via the Scheffe Graph
We propose an algorithm with improved query-complexity for the problem of hypothesis selection under local differential privacy constraints. Given a set of $k$ probability distributions $Q$, we describe an algorithm that satisfies local differential privacy, performs $\tilde{O}(k^{3/2})$ non-adaptive queries to individuals who each have samples from a probability distribution $p$, and outputs a probability distribution from the set $Q$ which is nearly the closest to $p$. Previous algorithms req…

Short answer: it won’t.
Conservatives have been calling for this for at least 20 years, and have never understood the question well enough to adequately address privacy, security, and safety concerns. https://flipboard.com/@bbcnews/top-stori…

Australia is banning social media for kids under 16. How will it work?
From 10 December, social media companies will have to take "reasonable steps" to ensure that under-16s in Australia cannot set up accounts on their platforms and that existing accounts are deactivated or removed. The government says the ban - a world-first policy popular with many parents - is aimed …

How to Get Actual Privacy and Utility from Privacy Models: the k-Anonymity and Differential Privacy Families
Josep Domingo-Ferrer, David S\'anchez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11299

How to Get Actual Privacy and Utility from Privacy Models: the k-Anonymity and Differential Privacy Families
Privacy models were introduced in privacy-preserving data publishing and statistical disclosure control with the promise to end the need for costly empirical assessment of disclosure risk. We examine how well this promise is kept by the main privacy models. We find they may fail to provide adequate protection guarantees because of problems in their definition or incur unacceptable trade-offs between privacy protection and utility preservation. Specifically, k-anonymity may not entirely exclude …

Weekend project: set up an IP cam server with Frigate on a Raspberry Pi I had lying around at my parents' house.
I'm worried about those old bastards, but I'm also worried that the stream from those cameras will end up on some hidden Internet forums.
I'm not interested in using the "cloud services" so kindly offered to me by big companies.
#privacy

Google Safe Browsing has started blocking websites using #Mailcow for self-hosting email. Google calls them dangerous, and they're right: dangerous to their data-driven business model.
Yet most people still use #Google services. They talk about privacy, even attend

Privacy oversight board finds FBI does not buy real-time location data https://therecord.media/pclob-finds-fbi-does-not-use-real-time-location-data

#Signal Should Improve Visualization of Its #Privacy Properties
https://karl-voit.at/2025/10/12/Signal

And there's a browser called "Floorp"!?
https://floorp.app/

Five Big Questions (and Zero Predictions) for the U.S. Privacy and AI Landscape in 2026
https://fpf.org/blog/five-big-questions-and-zero-predictions-for-the-u-s-privacy-and-ai-landscape-in-2026/

This popup is the one reason I extend the middle finger to a site. Two options should be three.
1. Accept all.
2. Modify what you don't want.
3. REJECT ALL
I am not going to go through hundreds of so-called partners and turn each one off.
One very cranky senior citizen this morning. Even after two huge mugs of coffee I am still tired and cranky.

MICA: Multi-Agent Industrial Coordination Assistant
Di Wen, Kunyu Peng, Junwei Zheng, Yufan Chen, Yitain Shi, Jiale Wei, Ruiping Liu, Kailun Yang, Rainer Stiefelhagen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15237

MICA: Multi-Agent Industrial Coordination Assistant
Industrial workflows demand adaptive and trustworthy assistance that can operate under limited computing, connectivity, and strict privacy constraints. In this work, we present MICA (Multi-Agent Industrial Coordination Assistant), a perception-grounded and speech-interactive system that delivers real-time guidance for assembly, troubleshooting, part queries, and maintenance. MICA coordinates five role-specialized language agents, audited by a safety checker, to ensure accurate and compliant sup…

In Youtube drama news, ILoveKimpossibleALot has moved on from false privacy strikes to false copyright strikes.
Copyright trolls are the fucking worst.
#ilovekimpossiblealot #youtube #drama

Concept Unlearning in Large Language Models via Self-Constructed Knowledge Triplets
Tomoya Yamashita, Yuuki Yamanaka, Masanori Yamada, Takayuki Miura, Toshiki Shibahara, Tomoharu Iwata
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15621

Concept Unlearning in Large Language Models via Self-Constructed Knowledge Triplets
Machine Unlearning (MU) has recently attracted considerable attention as a solution to privacy and copyright issues in large language models (LLMs). Existing MU methods aim to remove specific target sentences from an LLM while minimizing damage to unrelated knowledge. However, these approaches require explicit target sentences and do not support removing broader concepts, such as persons or events. To address this limitation, we introduce Concept Unlearning (CU) as a new requirement for LLM unl…

In my experience, speaking to my computer does not improve privacy, and certainly not when the machine listens to everything and phones it all home.
https://infosec.exchange/@defendopsdiaries/115384105662411639
Sure, accessibility is a benefit, but Windows alrea…

Whenever people are worried about criminals using #privacy-oriented software, I'm wondering who do they mean by "criminals"?
Let me point out that in some countries people verbally opposing the authoritarian regime are "criminals", while rapists become presidents. Or people peacefully protesting against genocide are "criminals", while nazis openly calling for violence are model citizens.
So yeah, if I were to develop such software, I'd rather have it used by "criminals". Because, guess what, true criminals will get their hands on that kind of software anyway.

Assessing metadata privacy in neuroimaging
Emilie Kibsgaard, Anita Sue Jwa, Christopher J Markiewicz, David Rodriguez Gonzalez, Judith Sainz Pardo, Russell A. Poldrack, Cyril R. Pernet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15278

Assessing metadata privacy in neuroimaging
The ethical and legal imperative to share research data without causing harm requires careful attention to privacy risks. While mounting evidence demonstrates that data sharing benefits science, legitimate concerns persist regarding the potential leakage of personal information that could lead to reidentification and subsequent harm. We reviewed metadata accompanying neuroimaging datasets from six heterogeneous studies openly available on OpenNeuro, involving participants across the lifespan, f…

Localsend is Great!
If you need a App that flawless send files to your cross platfom devices, Try Localsend.
No cloud or internet needed.
End-to-end encrypted transfers.
Simple, user-friendly interface.
Open-source.
Plus, European-developed (German) and privacy-focused.
https://localsend.org/

A Systematic Survey of Empirical User Studies of Unintentional Information Disclosure in Everyday Digital Interaction
Reza Shahriari, Eric D. Ragan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16003

A Systematic Survey of Empirical User Studies of Unintentional Information Disclosure in Everyday Digital Interaction
The exchange of personal information in digital environments poses significant risks, including identity theft, privacy breaches, and data misuse. Addressing these challenges requires a deep understanding of user behavior and mental models in diverse contexts. This paper presents a systematic literature review of empirical user studies on unintentional information disclosure in usable security, covering 101 papers published across six leading conferences from 2018 to 2023. The studies are categ…

What?
Researchers from the University of Vienna have quietly compiled a digital directory so vast that it contains the personal details of nearly half the global population by scraping the data of 3.5 billion WhatsApp users.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/whatsapp-da…

WhatsApp Data of 3.5 Billion Users Scraped in Record-Breaking Research Study
Researchers from the University of Vienna scraped data from 3.5 billion WhatsApp users, revealing significant privacy risks and prompting Meta to implement new security mitigations.

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.CY. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CY/new
[1/1]:
- Assessing metadata privacy in neuroimaging
Kibsgaard, Jwa, Markiewicz, Gonzalez, Pardo, Poldrack, Pernet

Canadian privacy regulators say schools share blame for PowerSchool hack https://therecord.media/canadian-privacy-regulators-say-schools-share-blame-powerschool-hack

Crosslisted article(s) found for eess.IV. https://arxiv.org/list/eess.IV/new
[1/1]:
- Assessing metadata privacy in neuroimaging
Kibsgaard, Jwa, Markiewicz, Gonzalez, Pardo, Poldrack, Pernet

Replaced article(s) found for cs.IT. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.IT/new
[1/1]:
- Chernoff Information as a Privacy Constraint for Adversarial Classification and Membership Advantage
Ay\c{s}e \"Unsal

I just submitted talk proposals for @… and @…. It goes beyond my usual ramblings on what privacy #foss tools we must use and it covers the…

Youth Privacy in Australia: Insights from National Policy Dialogues
https://fpf.org/blog/youth-privacy-in-australia-insights-from-national-policy-dialogues/
@…

Fed-PISA: Federated Voice Cloning via Personalized Identity-Style Adaptation
Qi Wang, Shituo Ma, Guoxin Yu, Hanyang Peng, Yue Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16010 https://…

Fed-PISA: Federated Voice Cloning via Personalized Identity-Style Adaptation
Voice cloning for Text-to-Speech (TTS) aims to generate expressive and personalized speech from text using limited data from a target speaker. Federated Learning (FL) offers a collaborative and privacy-preserving framework for this task, but existing approaches suffer from high communication costs and tend to suppress stylistic heterogeneity, resulting in insufficient personalization. To address these issues, we propose Fed-PISA, which stands for Federated Personalized Identity-Style Adaptation…

Well, that's two ways of putting it.
https://www.theverge.com/news/823750/european-union-ai-act-gdpr-changes

Europe is scaling back its landmark privacy and AI laws
The European Commission has proposed changes weakening EU privacy legislation and delaying parts of the AI Act to make the bloc more competitive globally.

First impressions of ChatGPT Atlas, as browser agents remain confusing, with insurmountable security and privacy risks including prompt injection attacks (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/21/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/

Introducing ChatGPT Atlas
Last year OpenAI hired Chrome engineer Darin Fisher, which sparked speculation they might have their own browser in the pipeline. Today it arrived. ChatGPT Atlas is a Mac-only web browser …

Sehr schöne Übersicht über Open-Source-Todo-Applikationen mit Anwendungsfällen.
https://super-productivity.com/blog/open-source-productivity-apps-comparison/

Open-Source Productivity Apps in 2025
Compare leading open-source productivity apps for 2025 – Super Productivity, Vikunja, Joplin, Taskwarrior, Trilium, and more – with privacy and platform details.

pgp_strong: PGP web of trust (2009)
Strongly connected component of the Pretty-Good-Privacy (PGP) web of trust among users, circa November 2009.
This network has 39796 nodes and 301498 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/pgp_strong

EU Set the Global Standard on Privacy and AI. Now It’s Pulling Back | TechPolicy.Press https://techpolicy.press/eu-set-the-global-standard-on-privacy-and-ai-now-its-pulling-back

EU Set the Global Standard on Privacy and AI. Now It’s Pulling Back | TechPolicy.Press
The draft Digital Omnibus could weaken core data protections and give tech companies more leeway in using European data, reports Ramsha Jahangir.

Privacy-Preserving Distributed Estimation with Limited Data Rate
Jieming Ke, Jimin Wang, Ji-Feng Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12549 https://arxiv.org/p…

Privacy-Preserving Distributed Estimation with Limited Data Rate
This paper focuses on the privacy-preserving distributed estimation problem with a limited data rate, where the observations are the sensitive information. Specifically, a binary-valued quantizer-based privacy-preserving distributed estimation algorithm is developed, which improves the algorithm's privacy-preserving capability and simultaneously reduces the communication costs. The algorithm's privacy-preserving capability, measured by the Fisher information matrix, is dynamically enhanced over…

Anyone know anything about solidagent.io?
They appear to be an EU hosted AI agent - in the sense that they have the trained models on their own platforms, rather than using an API so presumably queries etc stay on their servers.
Their statements of #privacy etc look good and the test queries I posted (on quite complex #coding problems) were very impressive, but I don't think it's strictly FOSS otherwise.
Would be happy to hear if others have good/bad experience with them as they seem quite new.
https://www.solidagent.io/privacy

Texas is making a list of transgender Texans using DMV data | KUT Radio, Austin's NPR Station https://www.kut.org/politics/2025-12-15/texas-trans-transgender-drivers-license-id-list-privacy

Texas is making a list of transgender Texans. It’s using driver's licenses to help.
A year after the state blocked transgender Texans from updating their state IDs, it has collected information on more than 100 people who have tried. Officials won’t say what they’re using the list for.

High-Probability Bounds For Heterogeneous Local Differential Privacy
Maryam Aliakbarpour, Alireza Fallah, Swaha Roy, Ria Stevens
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11895 https://…

High-Probability Bounds For Heterogeneous Local Differential Privacy
We study statistical estimation under local differential privacy (LDP) when users may hold heterogeneous privacy levels and accuracy must be guaranteed with high probability. Departing from the common in-expectation analyses, and for one-dimensional and multi-dimensional mean estimation problems, we develop finite sample upper bounds in $\ell_2$-norm that hold with probability at least $1-β$. We complement these results with matching minimax lower bounds, establishing the optimality (up to con…

Das war eigentlich nur eine Frage der Zeit ....
#Pornhub #privacy #hack
www.guardian.com:
Hackers access Pornhub’s premium users’ viewing habits and search history
ShinyHunters group repor…

Absolut hilfreiche Liste 👇
https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy

GitHub - pluja/awesome-privacy: Awesome Privacy - A curated list of services and alternatives that respect your privacy because PRIVACY MATTERS.
Awesome Privacy - A curated list of services and alternatives that respect your privacy because PRIVACY MATTERS. - pluja/awesome-privacy

Sparse-Autoencoder-Guided Internal Representation Unlearning for Large Language Models
Tomoya Yamashita, Akira Ito, Yuuki Yamanaka, Masanori Yamada, Takayuki Miura, Toshiki Shibahara
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15631

Sparse-Autoencoder-Guided Internal Representation Unlearning for Large Language Models
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across various applications, privacy and copyright concerns have heightened the need for more effective LLM unlearning techniques. Many existing unlearning methods aim to suppress undesirable outputs through additional training (e.g., gradient ascent), which reduces the probability of generating such outputs. While such suppression-based approaches can control model outputs, they may not eliminate the underlying knowledge embedded in the…

Zero-shot image privacy classification with Vision-Language Models
Alina Elena Baia, Alessio Xompero, Andrea Cavallaro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09253 https://

Zero-shot image privacy classification with Vision-Language Models
While specialized learning-based models have historically dominated image privacy prediction, the current literature increasingly favours adopting large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) designed for generic tasks. This trend risks overlooking the performance ceiling set by purpose-built models due to a lack of systematic evaluation. To address this problem, we establish a zero-shot benchmark for image privacy classification, enabling a fair comparison. We evaluate the top-3 open-source VLMs, accor…

The EU Commission is considering tweaking rules to simplify users' cookie preference settings, after its 2009 rule plastered the internet with consent banners (Ellen O'Regan/Politico)
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-cookie-…

Europe’s cookie law messed up the internet. Brussels wants to fix it.
The European Commission wants to take a bite out of privacy rules that force websites to run cookie banners.

Politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and bypass invasive laws.
Their solution?
Entirely ban the use of VPNs. 
Yes, really.
As of this writing, Wisconsin lawmakers are escalating their war on privacy
by targeting VPNs in the name of “protecting children”
in A.B. 105/S.B. 130.
It’s an age verification bill
that requires all websites distributing material that could conceivabl…

Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing
Remember when you thought age verification laws couldn't get any worse? Well, lawmakers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and beyond are about to blow you away.It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians...

Wow, what a wonderful day at @… ! They put on a great conference and I was honored to have been part of it. I held a privacy workshop and gave a #fedvierse talk. I just posted the worksheets from the workshop and the presentation from the talk over on the …

Replaced article(s) found for cs.CR. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CR/new
[1/1]:
- Unique Security and Privacy Threats of Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey
Shang Wang, Tianqing Zhu, Bo Liu, Ming Ding, Dayong Ye, Wanlei Zhou, Philip S. Yu

I must say... :)
Meetily is the bees knees for transcribing online meetings where you cannot use the native transcription
https://meetily.ai/

Filings: Meta's board agreed to a $190M settlement with investors over claims that Zuckerberg and other board members mishandled the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Jef Feeley/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

From Service-Oriented Computing to Metaverse Services: A Framework for Inclusive and Immersive Learning for Neurodivergent Students
Rachid Hamadi (School of Computer Science and Engineering UNSW Sydney Australia), Abdelmounaam Rezgui (School of Information Technology Illinois State University Normal IL USA), Ali Darejeh (School of Computer Science and Engineering UNSW Sydney Australia)

From Service-Oriented Computing to Metaverse Services: A Framework for Inclusive and Immersive Learning for Neurodivergent Students
The metaverse offers immersive and adaptive learning environments for neurodivergent students to thrive and reach their full potential. In this paper, we propose a generic framework that leverages metaverse services as an evolution beyond traditional service-oriented computing, enabling more interactive, personalized, and engaging educational experiences. By integrating AI-driven adaptability, multimodal interaction, and privacy-first service design, the framework ensures that learning remains …

Replaced article(s) found for cs.DB. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.DB/new
[1/1]:
- Who is Responsible When AI Fails? Mapping Causes, Entities, and Consequences of AI Privacy and Et...
Hilda Hadan, Reza Hadi Mogavi, Leah Zhang-Kennedy, Lennart E. Nacke

»8 Million Users' AI Conversations Sold for Profit by "Privacy" Extensions«
WTF?! Now don't tell me that this surprises you. Why do so many people still naively think to keep their privacy over VPN's for data-hungry big corporations?
🤷 https://www.koi.ai/blo…

8 Million Users' AI Conversations Sold for Profit by "Privacy" Extensions | Koi Blog

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.CR. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CR/new
[1/1]:
- Assessing metadata privacy in neuroimaging
Kibsgaard, Jwa, Markiewicz, Gonzalez, Pardo, Poldrack, Pernet

Future of Privacy Forum Appoints Four New Members to Its Board of Directors 
https://fpf.org/press-releases/future-of-privacy-forum-appoints-four-new-members-to-its-board-of-directors/

An interview with Chris Gilliard on his new book Luxury Surveillance, how smart wearables could normalize pervasive surveillance, X's political shift, and more (Anika Collier Navaroli/The Tech Policy Press Podcast)
https://techpolicy.press/through-to-th

Through to Thriving: Protecting Our Privacy with Chris Gilliard | TechPolicy.Press
Tech Policy Press fellow Anika Collier Navaroli in conversation with Critical Internet Studies Institute privacy researcher and advocate Chris Gilliard.

Privacy advocates see risk in new Meta policy that uses AI chats to serve targeted ads https://therecord.media/privacy-advocates-see-risks-meta-ai-ad-targeting

One thing we keep getting wrong: Privacy is a *human* right. Not a corporate right. Not a government right.
Corporations and governments, tools that – in theory at least – exist to serve the people, must be transparent and accountable.
Instead, today, we have the opposite: We give corporations and governments privacy and expect absolute transparency from everyday people. That’s broth for fascism.

For the #privacy aware people in or around #Prague . The first #Privacy Coffee/Beer/Juice meeting in scheduled.

PRivacy Coffee PRague #1 · Luma
A meeting for (digital) privacy aware people who would love to discover some common topics, exchange ideas and approaches and maybe have some drinks…

An information theorist's tour of differential privacy
Anand D. Sarwate, Flavio P. Calmon, Oliver Kosut, Lalitha Sankar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10316 https://

An information theorist's tour of differential privacy
Since being proposed in 2006, differential privacy has become a standard method for quantifying certain risks in publishing or sharing analyses of sensitive data. At its heart, differential privacy measures risk in terms of the differences between probability distributions, which is a central topic in information theory. A differentially private algorithm is a channel between the underlying data and the output of the analysis. Seen in this way, the guarantees made by differential privacy can be…

pgp_strong: PGP web of trust (2009)
Strongly connected component of the Pretty-Good-Privacy (PGP) web of trust among users, circa November 2009.
This network has 39796 nodes and 301498 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/pgp_strong

Life is short, so check out today's Metacurity for a concise rundown of the most critical infosec developments you should know, including
--California sets global standards with new landmark AI and data privacy laws,
--UK highly significant cyberattacks jumped by 50% over the past year,
--Australian cyber incidents rose 11% over the past year,
--Ofcom fined 4chan under new online safety regime,
--Researchers eavesdropped on sensitive satellite comms,
--…

California sets global standards with new landmark AI and data privacy laws
UK highly significant cyberattacks jumped by 50% over the past year, Australian cyber incidents rose 11% over the past year, Ofcom fined 4chan under new online safety regime, Researchers eavesdropped on sensitive satellite comms, Stingrays were used near Portland protest, much more

FPF Releases Updated Report on the State Comprehensive Privacy Law Landscape
https://fpf.org/blog/fpf-releases-updated-report-on-the-state-comprehensive-privacy-law-landscape/
@…

Vortex - Free, disposable email addresses
For annoying newsletters, websites, and everything in between! Protect your privacy and avoid spam with temporary email addresses.
📧 #email

Vortex - Free, disposable email addresses
Vortex is a free, disposable email address service that allows you to create temporary email addresses for privacy and spam protection. Use it to receive emails without revealing your real address.

Wall Street clearinghouse DTCC selects the Canton Network blockchain as a real-world asset tokenization partner after receiving a No-Action Letter from the SEC (Ian Allison/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/12/

Wall Street giant DTCC Picks privacy focused blockchain Canton Network for tokenization
Canton creator Digital Asset will help tokenize DTC-custodied U.S. Treasury securities.

Hybrid Deep Learning-Federated Learning Powered Intrusion Detection System for IoT/5G Advanced Edge Computing Network
Rasil Baidar, Sasa Maric, Robert Abbas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15555

Hybrid Deep Learning-Federated Learning Powered Intrusion Detection System for IoT/5G Advanced Edge Computing Network
The exponential expansion of IoT and 5G-Advanced applications has enlarged the attack surface for DDoS, malware, and zero-day intrusions. We propose an intrusion detection system that fuses a convolutional neural network (CNN), a bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), and an autoencoder (AE) bottleneck within a privacy-preserving federated learning (FL) framework. The CNN-BiLSTM branch captures local and gated cross-feature interactions, while the AE emphasizes reconstruction-based anomaly sensitivity. T…

The EU unveils proposed updates to GDPR, including simplifying cookie permission pop-ups, and plans to water down the AI Act, after US and tech company pressure (The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/823750/european-union-ai-act-gdpr-changes

Europe is scaling back its landmark privacy and AI laws
The European Commission has proposed changes weakening EU privacy legislation and delaying parts of the AI Act to make the bloc more competitive globally.

Basis Theory, which provides data management and payments infrastructure tools, raised a $33M Series B led by Costanoa, taking its total funding to $50M (David Penn/Finovate)
https://finovate.com/data-privacy-management-software-provider-basis-…

Data Privacy Management Software Provider Basis Theory Secures $33 Million - Finovate
Data management innovator Basis Theory has secured $33 million in Series B funding.

If you are looking for good privacy respecting messaging and other apps, you could check my slides from @… conference here : https://

Future of Privacy Forum Appoints Matthew Reisman as Vice President of U.S. Policy
https://fpf.org/press-releases/future-of-privacy-forum-appoints-matthew-reisman-as-vice-president-of-u-s-policy/

Sources: OneTrust, which sells privacy and compliance software and was last valued at $4.5B in 2023, is exploring a sale, possibly to private equity buyers (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/onetrus…

OneTrust, Privacy Startup Last Valued at $4.5 Billion, Discusses Private Equity Sale
OneTrust, a nine-year-old startup that benefited from a wave of European and U.S. laws regulating how companies collect and share website data, is exploring a sale—possibly to private equity buyers, according to people familiar with the discussions. The Atlanta-based startup, which sells privacy ...

Every week, Metacurity delivers our free and paid subscribers a run-down of the top infosec-related long reads we didn't have time for during the daily crush of cyber news.
This week's selection covers
--Massive surveillance in Mexico City leaves crime high,
--Workplace surveillance can harm workers,
--Machine learning privacy attacks are less effective in reality than they are in theory,
--LLMs produce more secure code when trained on flaw-free code,

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 11/8/25
Massive surveillance in Mexico City leaves crime high, Workplace surveillance can harm workers, Machine learning privacy attacks are less effective in reality than they are in theory, LLMs produce more secure code when trained on flaw-free code, Three major kinds of bots cause web resource headaches

Data privacy whistleblowers would get expanded protections under California proposal https://therecord.media/california-data-privacy-agency-whistleblower-protections-proposal

A Scalable, Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Identity and Verifiable Data Sharing Framework based on Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Hui Yuan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09715 https://

A Scalable, Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Identity and Verifiable Data Sharing Framework based on Zero-Knowledge Proofs
With the proliferation of decentralized applications (DApps), the conflict between the transparency of blockchain technology and user data privacy has become increasingly prominent. While Decentralized Identity (DID) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) provide a standardized framework for user data sovereignty, achieving trusted identity verification and data sharing without compromising privacy remains a significant challenge. This paper proposes a novel, comprehensive framework that integrates D…

Call for Nominations: 16th Annual Privacy Papers for Policymakers Awards
https://fpf.org/blog/call-for-nominations-16th-annual-privacy-papers-for-policymakers-awards/
@…

Sources: Salesforce's Slack tells customers in China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan that they must migrate their accounts to partner Alibaba before February (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/salesforces-slack-stop-…

Salesforce’s Slack to Stop Direct Service in China, Farm Out to Alibaba
Salesforce’s Slack has told customers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan that they must migrate their accounts to partner Alibaba Group before February, if they want to continue with instant-messaging service, according to a Slack customer in mainland China and an Alibaba Cloud employee. The move is in response to a privacy and data security law that came into effect this year in

N-output Mechanism: Estimating Statistical Information from Numerical Data under Local Differential Privacy
Incheol Baek, Yon Dohn Chung
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11116 https:/…

N-output Mechanism: Estimating Statistical Information from Numerical Data under Local Differential Privacy
Local Differential Privacy (LDP) addresses significant privacy concerns in sensitive data collection. In this work, we focus on numerical data collection under LDP, targeting a significant gap in the literature: existing LDP mechanisms are optimized for either a very small ($|Ω| \in \{2, 3\}$) or infinite output spaces. However, no generalized method for constructing an optimal mechanism for an arbitrary output size $N$ exists. To fill this gap, we propose the \textbf{N-output mechan…

Premio letterario-giuridico “DATA! The game” 2026
https://www.istitutoitalianoprivacy.it/2025/12/13/premio-letterario-giuridico-data-the-game/
@…

Canada’s privacy regulator to probe billboards equipped with facial scanning tech https://therecord.media/canada-privacy-regulator-to-probe-face-scanning-billboards

Circle launches USDCx, a privacy-focused version of its USDC stablecoin on the Aleo blockchain, to give users "banking-level privacy" with a "compliance record" (Ben Weiss/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/12/09/circle-privacy-stablecoin-aleo-uds…

Exclusive: Circle stablecoin for ‘banking-level privacy’ to launch on Aleo blockchain
Blockchains make data public, but Aleo founder Howard Wu hopes to lure big banks and institutions to crypto through semi-private stablecoins.

Prismo: A Decision Support System for Privacy-Preserving ML Framework Selection
Nges Brian Njungle, Eric Jahns, Luigi Mastromauro, Edwin P. Kayang, Milan Stojkov, Michel A. Kinsy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09985

Prismo: A Decision Support System for Privacy-Preserving ML Framework Selection
Machine learning has become a crucial part of our lives, with applications spanning nearly every aspect of our daily activities. However, using personal information in machine learning applications has sparked significant security and privacy concerns about user data. To address these challenges, different privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) frameworks have been developed to protect sensitive information in machine learning applications. These frameworks generally attempt to balance desi…

Pennsylvania's Supreme Court rules that police can get Google search data without a warrant; an expert warns it may encourage warrantless searches nationwide (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)
https://therecord.media/google-searches-police-access…

Pa. high court rules that police can access Google searches without a warrant
In a decision that only affects Pennsylvanians but could have privacy implications elsewhere, the state's Supreme Court ruled that police did not need a warrant to access a rape suspect's Google searches.

The Ethereum Foundation announces the "Privacy cluster", a team of 47 blockchain industry experts developing protocol-level privacy features for the network (Vince Quill/Cointelegraph)
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-foundation-privacy-cluster-team…