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