Techlore Talks brings you in-depth conversations with the experts at the forefront of digital rights, privacy and security.

A hacker impersonated a government agency and Revolut simply handed over customers' passports and IDs. Plus the age-verification wave and OpenAI's rogue agents.

Part 1 covered Proton Mail and your Proton account. This video covers the rest of the Proton suite: what to enable, what to ignore, and why. Watch on Techlore.TV for an ad-free, surveillance-free viewing experience

An ID-verification company leaked 153 million driver's licenses to a dark-web market, and it's the perfect case against ID uploads.

In 2027, your operating system is going to ask how old you are. California's age verification law (AB 1043) takes effect January 1st, and AB 1856 just carved Linux out of it. But the law still leaves many questions open, here's the good, the bad, and

Folding phones are the most fragile, least repairable, most expensive phones ever made.

Techlore Talks brings you in-depth conversations with the experts at the forefront of digital rights, privacy and security.

Mullvad, Obscura, Apple, and Firefox all shipped VPN improvements this week. Plus Flock's police AI, Meta's $16.68B settlement, and X killing Nitter.

Apple's iCloud Private Relay is still leaking real IP addresses weeks after disclosure and other Apple issues. Plus 737 fake VPN extensions and France's age-check loss.

Techlore Talks brings you in-depth conversations with the experts at the forefront of digital rights, privacy and security.

Comcast just turned millions of leased Xfinity routers into motion sensors that track movement through your home, and buried in the fine print is a clause letting them hand that data to third parties without telling you. Here's what Xfinity Shield actually does, why the tradeoff makes no

You can look up exactly which companies are getting your data from any website for free, in about a minute. But the tool everyone's sharing right now has a blind spot big enough that Facebook comes back completely clean. Here are three tools that actually show you what

Cory Doctorow says California's DROP tool is "privacy theater." I was skeptical too, so I asked the executive director behind DROP. Welcome to my deep-dive on how DROP works and why I decided to start using it.

This update brings 100+ new VPN pages you can browse without JavaScript, a smarter Quiz that stops recommending tools you already use, three new privacy tools, and a noticeably faster site across the board. Plus: a heads up on why v2026.09 might be late.

📰 Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts_,_ Spotify, other podcast apps, or RSS. You can also watch Surveillance Report on YouTube or Techlore.TV Click For All Sources * * * ## On My Radar 🎯 **Signal Just Had Its Biggest Week in Years** Signal is one of my favorite

Steam Deck and Framework owners both got caught in data breaches, but the plot twist is neither company was directly hacked. Here's exactly what to do if you were affected, step by step. From phishing to aliasing to password management.

In November 2021 I promised a Nextcloud series. Today, after five years, two restarts, and a few lessons already in the can, I'm scrapping it. Here's what went wrong, why none of it is Nextcloud's fault, and why knowing when to drop something is a skill I wish I'd learned sooner.

Techlore Talks brings you in-depth conversations with the experts at the forefront of digital rights, privacy and security.

OpenAI's rogue AI hacked more than Hugging Face, and Anthropic's did the same. Less Terminator, more big-tech negligence with faster tools.

Firefox just shipped its biggest redesign in six years, and it's already live in Nightly. I put regular Firefox side-by-side with the new Nova UI to show you what's changed: rounded tabs, a reworked settings menu, Kit, the return of Compact Mode, and a

A parent sends a photo of their sick child to a doctor, and ends up under police investigation... welcome to 1984. Initiatives like Chat Control and other advancements around the world aim to make this the permanent state of the internet. This video breaks down how photo and message scanning

France just became the first country in Europe to ban under-15s from social media. The UK and California moved the opposite direction, hackable US cars, and more!

Brave just shipped Containers, and Firefox just made them native, so the profiles-vs-containers debate that split these two browsers is finally over. This video demos both features side by side in Brave 1.92 and Firefox 153, and breaks down when to use browser profiles vs container tabs

Your phone number and email are in more breach databases than you think. Here's how to check exactly where you've been exposed using free tools, what to actually do about it, and how to stop it from being a recurring worry.

We're updating our weekly newsletter to fall under the Surveillance Report umbrella.

Techlore Talks brings you in-depth conversations with the experts at the forefront of digital rights, privacy and security.

The EU Parliament originally rejected mass message scanning, then passed it anyway. Plus Microsoft's decade-old Secure Boot flaw, the age verification wave, and LAPD drops Flock.

Techlore Talks brings you in-depth conversations with the experts at the forefront of digital rights, privacy and security.

Your password manager is the most sensitive piece of software in your tech stack. It holds everything - your email, banking, work credentials, health records, crypto, and more. Here's how 12 of the most popular ones actually stack up. Watch on Techlore.TV for an ad-free, surveillance-free

Apple's Hide My Email aliases are moving to a subdomain that sites can easily block. Plus Chrome ends uBlock Origin, Google eyes your IP, and the Arch AUR mess.

After years of recommending Apple Maps as a private Google Maps alternative, that recommendation just got more complicated – Apple Maps is getting ads. Here are three alternatives worth knowing about. Watch on Techlore.TV for an ad-free, surveillance-free viewing experience

Techlore Talks brings you in-depth conversations with the experts at the forefront of digital rights, privacy and security.

App tracking is mostly invisible, but now there's a free & open source iOS app that changes that. Loupe shows you what any app on your iPhone can quietly collect without asking for a single permission. This video walks through what it reveals, why it matters, and what

Your VPN sees every site you visit, every app you use, and every search you make. Choosing the wrong one means trading your ISP's surveillance for something potentially worse. Here's our 3rd tier list of 2026! Watch on Techlore.TV for an ad-free, surveillance-free

Meta secretly shipped facial-recognition code to 50M+ phones then quietly deleted it, the UK moves to scan every device, and two states split hard on privacy.

Most apps claiming to be "private and secure" are using language that sounds meaningful but commits to almost nothing. I broke this down after watching a Shark Tank segment on Qeepsake, a baby journal app that calls itself "absolutely private and secure" because it has an

Techlore Talks brings you in-depth conversations with the experts at the forefront of digital rights, privacy and security.

Dashlane confirms hackers stole around 20 encrypted password vaults, and it's being quiet about how. Plus US troops tracked via location data, Europe ditching US tech, and a wild Meta AI hijack.

Your cell carrier knows your name, your location, who you called, when you called them, how long you talked, and more. What's worse, this data sits on their servers for years. VPNs and Signal help, but they don't touch the infrastructure layer. Here's what

Techlore Talks brings you in-depth conversations with the experts at the forefront of digital rights, privacy and security.

A vulnerability hit our self-hosted PeerTube in May. Here's exactly what happened, what was (and wasn't) at risk, and what it can teach about self-hosting.

A rare win against age verification with California exempting open source! Plus AI cameras on school buses, a push to ban police license plate tracking, and more.

Google I/O this year made something very clear: Google Search isn't really for you anymore. AI agents that buy things on your behalf, Gemini reading your Gmail and Calendar to "personalize" your results, and AI Overviews pushing real links further down the page with every

A brutal week of Microsoft vulnerabilities, an npm supply chain attack on 600+ packages, Signal vs Canada, Meta's AI age detection, and Bitwarden worries.

E-ink displays that promise ambient, distraction-free information sound great in theory. TRMNL delivers on the concept, with open firmware & open hardware, but the reality of living with it is more nuanced. Here are my thoughts! Watch on Techlore.TV for an ad-free, surveillance-free viewing experience

Techlore Talks brings you in-depth conversations with the experts at the forefront of digital rights, privacy and security.

"Privacy is dead, lol." "You're naive to still care." If you've seen those comments under every privacy story, you've witnessed an engineered hopelessness (digital resignation) with a clear designer and a measurable cost. In this video, I break down who

Linux's vulnerability saga hits a third entry, ICE agents are walking around with a Palantir database of 20 million people, and Android delivers both a refused-to-patch VPN leak and a useful new intrusion logging tool for high-risk users.

iOS 26.5 just brought end-to-end encryption to iPhone-to-Android texts for the first time ever. Here's what it actually protects, who can use it, and what the headlines aren't telling you.

Google's new reCAPTCHA can require Google Play Services to pass, meaning a de-Googled phone will fail the "are you human?" check. Combined with mandatory developer verification and AOSP going private, the pattern over the last year is impossible to ignore. Here's what I think