There’s a shocking lack of diversity in the smartphone market. Either you’re boasting an iPhone in your pocket or you’re carrying around an Android. But | Continue reading
The Chinese government and the Chinese telecommunications companies such as Huawei under its control are proposing a “New IP” addressing system for the | Continue reading
Warning: This post contains uncomfortable levels of personal information. My name is David Rutland. I’m the managing editor of PIA's blog, and I suppose | Continue reading
Back in April, Privacy News Online reported on an important set of proposals from the European Commission to regulate the use of artificial intelligence biometric recognition | Continue reading
In the wake of the West's chaotic withdrawal from Kabul, and the rapid takeover of the country by the Taliban, Afghanistan continues to dominate the | Continue reading
As this blog has frequently noted, the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) plays a crucial role in the privacy world. It not only creates | Continue reading
Last month, this blog looked at the continuing repercussions of the decision by the EU's top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), to Continuing repercussions of CJEU decision to strike down Privacy Shield | Continue reading
A new law being proposed in Germany would see all 19 federal state intelligence agencies in Germany granted the power to spy on German citizens through the use of trojans. The new law would force internet service providers (ISPs) to install government hardware at their data cente … | Continue reading
Linkedin and Reddit both check your clipboard and copy and paste your clipboard contents with every keystroke – even when you’re in another app. Another set of potential privacy violators have been called out by iOS 14’s new paste notifications. The discovery was publicized on Tw … | Continue reading
Linkedin and Reddit both check your clipboard and copy and paste your clipboard contents with every keystroke – even when you’re in another app. Another set of potential privacy violators have been called out by iOS 14’s new paste notifications. The discovery was publicized on Tw … | Continue reading
The Patriot Act is up for renewal with the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act and this bill as-is allows the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice (DOJ) to access your internet history without a warrant. Under this new law, all the DOJ has to do is claim th … | Continue reading
Privacy News Online provides a “Week in Review” with privacy news summaries from around the world. Keep up to date with what has happened in the online privacy world over the last week here. Featured: Privacy News Online – Week of May 11th Hungary suspends parts of the GDPR as pa … | Continue reading
The Hungarian government is suspending portions of the GDPR as part of their COVID-19 response. They are allowed to do so because the country is under a state of emergency – which may never end. Under the new measures, authorities will no longer need to abide by key provisions of … | Continue reading
Open source figures frequently on this blog. That’s in part because Private Internet Access is a long-time supporter of free software, and is in the process of open-sourcing its own software. But more generally, privacy is deeply bound up with open source, for reasons a recent po … | Continue reading
In March, Private Internet Access rolled out WireGuard® support to our beta testers on PIA desktop clients and mobile apps. We are proud to announce that WireGuard support is out of beta and available to all of our users now. WireGuard is officially a go on our Windows, Mac, Linu … | Continue reading
The Firefox Browser is not as private as you may think – especially on iOS and Android. Mozilla recently announced that they would be allowing any Firefox user a means to request Mozilla to delete stored telemetry data that is tied to said user. Mozilla maintains “strict limits” … | Continue reading
A recent article by Thomas Brewster at Forbes highlights the fact that the FBI is able to unlock iPhones using a product called Graykey. Specifically, a product called Graykey was used in a case against Baris Ali Koch to unlock Koch’s iPhone – an iPhone 11 Pro. Graykey works by b … | Continue reading
The VPN industry looks just like the world of religion – everyone has their different beliefs on who to trust. However, even the diamond in the rough lied to the princess. Is it really possible to blindly trust a person or entity without getting hurt in the end? Those of you who … | Continue reading
The Breakpointing Bad team at the University of New Mexico recently reported a VPN vulnerability that affects Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android, and more. The vulnerability allows malicious actors to not only see your VPN IP address, but also identify sites you are visiting and inject d … | Continue reading
There have been so many different emails and articles floating around about the ISOC sale of PIR to a new, two-person investment firm with only one investment, it’s hard to piece together exactly what has happened and when. I have put together a timeline based upon what I have re … | Continue reading
Millions of years ago, when we were the prey, we relied on our ability to have privacy to hide our location, smell and sounds. With privacy, we gained freedom — and we survived. However, over time, we gave up many freedoms in exchange for peaceful order, as social contracts and c … | Continue reading
Last week, Google announced that it would be buying Fitbit, valuing the 12-year-old company at $2.1 billion. Many have seen this as an attempt to boost Google’s position in the wearables sector. So far, the company’s Wear OS platform has made relatively little impact. The acquisi … | Continue reading
You may have heard earlier this year that Cloudflare was planning a mobile VPN called WARP. Today, 9/5/19, Cloudflare has officially opened its WARP “VPN” feature on its popular 1.1.1.1. DNS encrypting app to the public – and it’s important to note that WARP is NOT private. What … | Continue reading
Private Internet Access’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) is being blocked in Hong Kong. Last week, it was leaked that Hong Kong’s (HK) internet service providers (ISPs) had made plans to shut down internet dependent services and apps used by the protesters that have been marching … | Continue reading
UK internet users and internet users around the world need to beware of the GHOST protocol. The GCHQ, which is the United Kingdom’s (UK) equivalent of the American NSA, came up with the GHOST protocol as a potential application of the Investigatory Powers Act. The UK’s IP Act all … | Continue reading
President Trump has a plan to involve the FTC and FCC in policing censorship by social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter. Earlier in August, CNN’s Brian Fung reported on a summary of a draft executive order from President Trump that was first reported on by Politico. T … | Continue reading
part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 Purpose This multi-part blog series aims to outline the path of a packet from the wire through the network driver and kernel until it reaches the receive queue for a socket. This information pertains to the Linux kernel, release 3.13.0. … | Continue reading
Starting since version 1.30, the Mac, Linux, and Windows Private Internet Access (PIA) desktop clients have come with the ability to change the selected Name Server from PIA’s Domain Name System (DNS) servers to using one of PIA’s Handshake Name System (HNS) servers. Once this se … | Continue reading
In today’s world, people who commit fraud, or scammers, frequently attempt to masquerade as another person or entity. Identity theft happens for a multitude of reasons, including but not limited to stealing credit, credentials or currency, or as an attempt to discredit by falsely … | Continue reading
Facebook has been appearing on this blog with increasing frequency. In one way, that’s natural. A social network, by definition, is about people and their personal information, and so is likely to be of interest to readers of this site. But Facebook is frequently cavalier in how … | Continue reading
As numerous posts on this blog have noted, some of the biggest threats to privacy come from Internet giants like Facebook and Google. The centralized nature of their services allows them to aggregate personal data on a huge scale, and to extract information that we never agreed t … | Continue reading
The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly part of our everyday lives, with so-called “smart” speakers especially popular, But for all their undoubted technical merits, they also represent a growing threat to privacy, as this blog has reported before. There are several aspects … | Continue reading
Several websites including Voat, ZeroHedge, Archive.is, LiveLeak, and others have been blocked in Australia and New Zealand in direct contravention to civil liberties that citizens are supposed to have. The biggest of these internet providers, Telstra, has published a blog post d … | Continue reading
A privacy flaw in TLS encryption standards can out private users by exploiting related keys and associating them with identities, even with a new IP address. | Continue reading
The image you see above, is part of a full page ad we ran in The New York Times Sunday Edition today, October 21, 2018. Late last night, we were informed that our ad had been pulled, but around 80,000 copies had already left. The ad had already been approved and paid for. Howe … | Continue reading
In security circles, WireGuard is an exciting proposition. It is a modern, open-source VPN client and server system that is highly streamlined, lean, and easy to review due to its simplicity. Conceptually, this is something we have been seeing a hard push for in both cryptography … | Continue reading
Remember Google Glass? Five years ago, it was the hot new accessory for those who wanted to live at the bleeding edge of technology. But once Google Glasses started being used in public, people realized that they represented a massive intrusion into the private lives of everyone … | Continue reading
A new standard for cryptography is on the horizon, called Transport Level Security 1.3 (TLS 1.3). TLS 1.3 is a major update to cryptography, and fundamentally changes how websites and services will handle negotiating and executing encrypted services. Among the big improvements ar … | Continue reading
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force back in May. One reason many people know about the GDPR is because they were bombarded with emails asking them to accept updated privacy policies as a result. Another is that some companies have required people to … | Continue reading
Oppression for Pennies – The Cost of Surveillance is Falling If there’s one thing the Internet has taught us over the last 40 years, it is that information is power. The Internet has made and ruined careers, toppled corrupt regimes, made and broken millions of relationships, disr … | Continue reading
In the computing world, there’s always a new buzzword or trend that everyone chases as the next “big thing.” Software Defined Networks (SDNs) will replace most network technicians. Augmented Reality will be a part of our daily lives. Everyone will have a 3-D TV by 2020. Who needs … | Continue reading