Data & Privacy
End-to-end encryption: what it protects and what it never did
The contents of your messages and the fact that you sent them are two different secrets, and only one is usually covered.
Data & Privacy
Tracking, encryption, telemetry and who gets to see what.
20 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
Data & Privacy
What a website knows about you before you click anything
Identification does not require cookies any more. Understanding what replaced them explains why blocking cookies changed so little.
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Data & Privacy
Why a website cannot tell you your own password
A correctly built service never stores what you typed, only a one-way transformation of it, and that design decides what a breach…
Data & Privacy
What an app permission actually grants, and for how long
Permission prompts describe a category, not a specific action, and the gap between those two is where most surprises live.
Data & Privacy
Your phone knows where it is without using GPS at all
Positioning usually comes from databases of nearby wireless networks, which is faster, works indoors, and creates a different…
Data & Privacy
Face and fingerprint unlock are convenience features with a security trade
Biometrics are excellent at making strong protection tolerable and poor at being secrets, because you cannot change them.
Data & Privacy
Not all two-factor authentication is equal, and codes by text are the weak one
The second factor exists to survive a stolen password, and the methods differ enormously in whether they actually do.
Data & Privacy
The padlock in your browser means less than most people think
A certificate proves the connection is encrypted to the name in the address bar, and says nothing about who is behind it.
Data & Privacy
What telemetry actually sends, and why software collects it
Usage data genuinely improves products and is also the least examined category of collection in most software.
Data & Privacy
What actually happens when you delete something
Deletion usually removes a reference rather than the data, and the copies you did not make are the ones that persist.
Data & Privacy
Your page view is auctioned in the time it takes the page to load
An advertising slot triggers a real-time auction among many bidders, and the bid request is where the personal data goes.
Data & Privacy
Anonymised data is frequently not anonymous
Removing names is not the same as removing identity, and combinations of ordinary attributes are often unique.