Sergey Shkundaleu @archit3ct@social.ssbx.dev

I have decided to write a longer post on subject of improving privacy of your phone and how to approach it in general. Here is the link to my blog post: https://sergeysh.com/2025/12/22/Privacy-on-your-phone/

Android or iOS based phone? Both types that are commercially available are bad for privacy. To minimize number of trackers on Android side stick to Pixels and ignore everything else. On iOS side there is only one. Then depending on how tech savvy you are you can do a lot, goal is simple to make sure no company has a control over your life and you can lose relationship with that company at any moment if they pull the plug.

Deepfakes gaining popularity among scammers, there are stories that nation state sponsored threat actor infiltrated a lot of world wide companies, and they used deep fakes to pass interviews and so on. So it's important to have plan within your own family to ensure that you are not talking to a deepfake. Maybe to resort to a secret word which only your family members would know.
Link:https://www.biometricupdate.com/202512/deepfakes-social-engineering-working-together-to-break-human-judgment

Article, that tells a story that man got locked out of his Apple account by trying to redeem gift card, Apple account apparently has his entire life ... and then conclusion is you need to buy gift cards at a verified location and then appeal if you locked out. However no one talks about digital sovereignty and the fact maybe you don't need to store your data on "somebody else's computer" because that's what cloud is. https://tidbits.com/2025/12/18/compromised-apple-gift-card-saga-ends-well-but-risks-remain/

Interesting development in AI cybersecurity capabilities, new OpenAI model that is aiming to make it easy to discover vulnerabilities. Only time will show how effective it is. Read here: https://cybersecuritynews.com/gpt-5-2-codex/

Legal requirements of age verification by platform in EU and some states in US will only lead to one thing instead of protecting children it will expose adults. Those services or platforms using them will eventually get breached. Here is an example of such failure, 70K of records exposed by Discord. https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incident-involving-third-party-customer-service

Surveillance is easy, it does not require any special equipment and for little bit of money you can do a lot. Here is article analyzing Le Monde's article that talks about tracking of daily movement of French police and military. What can you do about it? Start deleting advertisement ID, may not help much but it's a good first step. I wrote about that in my mini advent calendar for privacy improvement on punkprivacy.com. Here is article itself: https://proton.me/blog/ad-tech-privacy #punkprivacy

Came across Spam Watch 2025 report by Proton team. Key finding that there is no retailers that were good in respecting privacy and low volume of marketing fluff. Surprisingly there were global retailers respecting privacy and not using any trackers in their emails. Some retailers came close with no trackers and low volume, but then they probably had a team who used different system and once in a while they'll sent an email with lot's of trackers. Report: https://res.cloudinary.com/dbulfrlrz/images/v1765301399/wp-pme/proton-mail-spam-watch-2025--the-u-s--inbox-overload-hidden-tracker-report/proton-mail-spam-watch-2025--the-u-s--inbox-overload-hidden-tracker-report.pdf

Article stating that Meta earning a fortune from fraudulent ads. Ads has no real purpose other than to track you across the internet, those are small beacons of data that you take with you everywhere you go on the Internet. Solid reason to use ad-blockers, especially if particular platform does not care about protecting you from fraudsters and you are better off DIY.
Link: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/

Total surveillance is here, ALPR can track all of your car movements and unfortunately technology being used for warrant-less surveillance. Check out this article.
Link:https://proton.me/blog/ai-license-plate-reader
#privacy

There are a lot of talks about abundance in the age of AI. But let's take a deeper look into a subject. Whole theory hinges on the idea that AI will create so much wealth that some form of universal basic income will be introduced in the future. However, if you think such measure would require wealth redistribution and for any non-human entity we call "corporation" profit is a sole purpose of it's existence. Prove me wrong!

Meta and Alibaba launched AI powered glasses back in September, one could think that those would face exactly the same fate as all previous smart glasses, however this time market is bit different, you can do much more with AI powered continuously run camera. As Dutch journalist Alexander Klöpping demonstrated that you can use them for example for real time face recognition on public data for example. That's going to be a nightmare.
#privacy

I've learned today that there is a privacy focused cell phone provider. However they missing key difference between anonymity and privacy, it's more appropriate to call them an anonymity focused provider, they only require 9 digits zipcode. Looks interesting though! #privacy

When was the last time you reviewed apps on your phone? Apps typically collect lots of data, if you don't need app right now, delete it you can install it later when you need it. It's a simple hygiene that will dramatically improve your privacy. #punkprivacy

Here is a good article on what happens if deal too good to be true: when buying all in one "streaming device" with promise to get access to streaming content. So best case scenario is device just part of a botnet that is for sale ...
Link:https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-streaming-box-part-of-a-botnet/
#cybersecurity

Interesting story from EFF, apparently school issued laptops may be spying on everything kids do at home. Not the first time, and won't be the last time. If you have kids beware and have a conversation with them about it and privacy.
Link:https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/eff-arizona-federal-court-protect-public-school-students-surveillance-and
#privacy

Do you use Echo devices by Amazon? Do you know that they typically come with Sidewalk bridge turned on by default? Amazon Sidewalk is a mesh network that uses LoRa among other things for long distance communication. Sidewalk device in a bridge mode will share it's Internet connection with some random device, sometimes half a mile away. While it's low bandwidth did you really signed up for that when you bought it? If not - disable it.
#punkprivacy

Data sovereignty is typically discussed in a context of a state nation, however we need to rethink approach and look at it from a standpoint of an individual to avoid situations where individuals is forced to give up on privacy just to participate in a society. Example often involve kids at school who forced to use educational systems that won't work without giving advertisement platforms access to their data.
#privacy