https://sangtd.net/tags/privacy/Recent content in Privacy on Sang's BlogHugo -- gohugo.ioenSun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/standards-are-infrastructure-not-merchandise/Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/standards-are-infrastructure-not-merchandise/On June 17, 2026, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers made an announcement that should not have been news. SMPTE, the 110-year-old organization that defines the technical standards behind everything from film reel dimensions to digital cinema projection, declared that its entire catalog of more than eight hundred standards documents would now be freely available to anyone, anywhere, without a paywall. The announcement was treated as a significant event.https://sangtd.net/age-verification-is-the-trojan-horse/Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/age-verification-is-the-trojan-horse/In November 2024, Australia passed a law banning anyone under sixteen from using social media. The public reaction was predictable: finally, someone is doing something about the children. The headlines wrote themselves. The opposition barely registered as a whisper. Who would defend giving Instagram to a twelve-year-old? The argument felt airtight because it started from a premise nobody could dispute: children should be protected, platforms should be held responsible, and if a law achieves that, it is a good law.https://sangtd.net/what-you-hide-from-yourself/Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/what-you-hide-from-yourself/There are two kinds of people who cannot face themselves. The first kind hides. They encrypt their messages, route their traffic through layers of anonymity, withdraw from every platform that demands a real name. They talk about surveillance, about consent, about the right to be left alone. Their arguments are technically sound, philosophically respectable, and often emotionally urgent in a way that the arguments alone cannot explain. The second kind performs.https://sangtd.net/anonymous-networks-from-vpn-to-tor-to-freenet/Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/anonymous-networks-from-vpn-to-tor-to-freenet/The internet is not private. Each time you visit a website, your IP address is logged. Your internet provider can see every domain you connect to. The websites themselves can see your approximate location. Advertising networks compile behavioural profiles of your browsing across sites. Governments and corporations perform deep packet inspection on backbone traffic. The default state of being online is to be watched. You can either accept this or push back.https://sangtd.net/dns-is-the-phonebook-of-the-internet/Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/dns-is-the-phonebook-of-the-internet/Every time you open a website, your computer asks a question you never see. It translates the domain name you typed into the IP address of the server that hosts the page. The Domain Name System handles this translation, and it does so through a hierarchy: your computer checks its cache first, then contacts a resolver — typically run by your internet provider — which queries the root servers, the top-level domain servers and finally the authoritative name servers for the specific domain.https://sangtd.net/firefox-the-forks-cannot-save-it/Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/firefox-the-forks-cannot-save-it/Your browser is the most important program on your computer. More than your text editor, more than your terminal, more than any other tool you use throughout the day. Everything flows through it. Your email, your banking, your reading, your communication, your work, your entertainment. The browser is the operating system that matters, and the actual operating system underneath has been reduced to a bootloader for it. This makes the question of who controls the browser not a technical question but a political one.https://sangtd.net/privacy-is-not-security/Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/privacy-is-not-security/There is a mistake that privacy-focused communities make so consistently that it has become almost invisible. It is the assumption that a product marketed as privacy-respecting is also more secure. This assumption is not just wrong. It is dangerous. Privacy and security are different properties, they require different organisational capabilities, and they frequently conflict in ways that leave users worse off than if they had never switched at all. The distinction is not subtle once you state it plainly.https://sangtd.net/linux-and-the-linux-foundation-open-source-that-shaped-the-world/Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/linux-and-the-linux-foundation-open-source-that-shaped-the-world/In 1991, Linus Torvalds posted to the comp.os.minix newsgroup that he was writing a free operating system — not a big project, just a hobby. He said it would never be “professional” like GNU. Thirty-five years later, the Linux kernel runs on 100% of the top 500 supercomputers, on the majority of smartphones through Android, on every major cloud provider’s servers, and on billions of embedded devices from routers to Teslas.https://sangtd.net/cryptocurrency-and-the-dream-of-financial-privacy/Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/cryptocurrency-and-the-dream-of-financial-privacy/In 1993, mathematician Eric Hughes published A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto. It began with the assertion that privacy is essential for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something you do not want everyone to know. A secret is something you do not want anyone to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal yourself to the world. This distinction is important because it shapes everything that follows.https://sangtd.net/cryptocurrency-why-it-works/Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/cryptocurrency-why-it-works/Before you can have an opinion about cryptocurrency — whether it is the future of money, a speculative bubble, a tool for criminals or a hedge against inflation — you need to understand something more basic: what it actually is. Not the price. Not the headlines. Not the guy on Twitter who got rich or the other guy who lost everything. The thing itself. Where does a Bitcoin come from? Why can’t someone just copy it?https://sangtd.net/the-encryption-paradox-when-privacy-enables-crime/Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/the-encryption-paradox-when-privacy-enables-crime/Trust in cloud providers has disappeared. This did not happen overnight. It has eroded over the years due to data breaches, secret surveillance programmes, advertising scandals and terms of service updates that have redefined ownership without permission. Google scanning emails for ad targeting: Microsoft has shared data with US intelligence under PRISM. Dropbox has accidentally granted full access to anyone with a link, and iCloud photos have leaked through credential-stuffing attacks.https://sangtd.net/rss-died-because-it-was-too-honest-for-the-advertising-business/Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/rss-died-because-it-was-too-honest-for-the-advertising-business/Some technologies die because they were inferior. Some die because they were replaced by something genuinely better. And some die not because they failed, but because they succeeded too well at something that powerful companies needed to stop. RSS belongs in the third category. It was not beaten in the marketplace by a superior alternative. It was starved to death by companies whose business models could not tolerate the kind of open, user-controlled information flow that RSS enabled.https://sangtd.net/tracking-apps-the-escape-hatch-from-data-lock-in/Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/tracking-apps-the-escape-hatch-from-data-lock-in/You know you should stop using platforms that exploit your data. You want to. But you cannot, because all your history is locked inside them. Ten years of Spotify playlists. Five hundred books logged on Goodreads. A decade of watched films on Netflix. These are not just lists. They are a record of your tastes, your memories, your identity as a consumer of culture. Leaving the platform means losing all of that.https://sangtd.net/activitypub-and-at-protocol-decentralised-social-media/Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/activitypub-and-at-protocol-decentralised-social-media/Imagine if you could not send emails from Gmail to Outlook users. Or if you could only open certain websites in certain browsers. It would be absurd, yet this is exactly how social media works today. You cannot follow a Mastodon account from X. You cannot watch a PeerTube video on TikTok. You cannot comment on a Pixelfed photo from Instagram. Every platform is a walled city. Your audience, your posts, and your reputation are all trapped inside by design.https://sangtd.net/matrix-and-xmpp-messaging-you-actually-own/Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/matrix-and-xmpp-messaging-you-actually-own/Every message you send on WhatsApp, Telegram, or Discord is routed via someone else’s server. You do not own the conversation. You cannot control the archive. You cannot transfer your chat history to another platform without losing it all. The platform can change its privacy policy, display adverts, sell your data, or shut down entirely, and there is nothing you can do about it. Over a lifetime, your messages amount to a detailed record of personal relationships, work discussions, ideas, and decisions.https://sangtd.net/email-the-original-open-protocol/Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/email-the-original-open-protocol/Email is the successful federated protocol. Since RFC 821 defined SMTP in 1982, anyone has been able to run a mail server and exchange messages with anyone else running one. A Gmail user can send to an Outlook user, who can send to someone on a custom domain, who can send to someone on iCloud. There is no central authority. No single company owns the network. There is not even a single implementation — Postfix, Exim, Dovecot and others all interoperate because they adhere to the same RFCs.https://sangtd.net/dav-protocols-open-standards-for-your-data/Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/dav-protocols-open-standards-for-your-data/Where does your data live? If you use Google Calendar, your schedule is stored on Google’s servers. If you use iCloud Contacts, your address book is stored on Apple’s servers. The same applies to Dropbox: your files live on Dropbox’s servers. While you can access this data through apps and web interfaces, you do not truly own it. The provider can change the terms, discontinue the service, or scan your data for advertising.https://sangtd.net/the-battle-for-privacy/Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0700https://sangtd.net/the-battle-for-privacy/As someone who values privacy and personal data, I always try to use services and solutions that protect my privacy. I say ’try’ because there are many things you can’t simply abandon. Personal use services such as Notes, Tasks, Calendar and Email can be switched to self-hosted alternatives. But you can’t do that with YouTube or Spotify. These platforms require a large user base to operate. PeerTube could technically replace YouTube, but it lacks content, an established user network and ingrained habits.