Illustration: fria / Privacy Guides
More and more devices are internet-enabled these days, which means the possiblity of malware. A lot of focus goes into securing the software running on our devices, but even if our operating systems are secure, if the lower level firmware that controls our hardware is compromised it's essentially all for naught.
Illustration: fria / Privacy Guides
Email is ubiquitous. If you want to function in modern society, you pretty much have to have an email address. What was originally just a simple protocol to send messages between machines has morphed beyond what it was originally intended for into the de facto authentication, identity, and "secure" communication channel for almost all technology users today. It's been updated many times to fix security issues and there are more updates to come, but is it worth trying to fix a decades-old protocol, or should we scrap it all and start over?
Image: Privacy Guides / Jordan Warne
Is it possible to collect data from a large group of people but protect each individual's privacy? In this entry of my series on privacy-enhancing technologies, we'll discuss differential privacy and how it can do just that.
Illustration: Jordan Warne / Privacy Guides
We know how to secure data in storage using E2EE, but is it possible to ensure data privacy even while processing it server-side? This is the first in a series of articles I'll be writing covering the privacy-enhancing technologies being rolled out.
Photo: Kseniya Lapteva / Pexels | Logo: Content Credentials
With the popularity of generative AI, it's becoming more and more difficult to distinguish reality from fiction. Can this problem be solved using cryptography? What are the privacy implications of the currently proposed systems?
Background Image: Thomas Ensley / Unsplash
Services that require authentication can correlate your activity on that service with your account, and that account is normally linked with payment information that could potentially link back to your real identity. With the Privacy Pass protocol, it doesn't have to be that way.
Illustration: Jordan / Privacy Guides | Photo: Gowtham AGM / Unsplash
Passwords are annoying, vulnerable to attack, and prone to human error. The multitude of issues with passwords has cost millions of dollars and forced terrible band-aid solutions in how we handle signing up for, logging in to, and securing online accounts. I'd like to break down some of these design paradigms that have entrenched themselves in our lives and how passkeys can lead to more secure and private online accounts.
Illustration: Jonah Aragon / Privacy Guides | Photo: Jair Lázaro / Unsplash
Biometrics are a convenient and secure way to authenticate our devices. Many of us use and trust the biometrics of our devices without much thought, but are they really secure? With so many options, which ones are the best?
The concept of a progressive web app is enticing: an application using web technologies that is inherently cross-platform (since it runs in a browser) and acts like a native app, even functioning offline. Support for PWAs in traditionally locked-down platforms like iOS means that PWAs can give users the freedom to install apps without having to go through Apple’s App Store. But there are problems with web content that PWAs haven't solved.
Multi-Party Relays (MPRs) are a technology that aims to provide better privacy protections than VPNs do. MPRs showed a lot of promise when they first emerged, but years later there are fewer options than ever. What happened?