The Private Citizen

If we start to outlaw fake news, wo will decide what is fake and what is the truth? Do we trust the state? Should journalists do it? And what are we actually afraid of here?

Here in Germany, we are plunging the country into an Orwellian nightmare which now, for the first time in the history of the country, also includes actual curfews. Meanwhile, the government's next anti-COVID-app is a complete failure on pretty much all levels.

Third-party cookies are on the way out and Google says it has found a privacy preserving way of replacing them, using a technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts. Is such a thing even possible? And what are the potential problems we, as web users, are facing here?

In this episode, Ubiquiti explains to us how to not run a company these days: Put things in the cloud needlessly, fuck up on security not once, but twice, and then mislead your customers about it.

Even though science is almost a pseudo-religion to many people these days, a lot of them don't really understand what the word means or how scientists work. And one of the biggest factors in this is that people do not understand a scientist's relationship to facts.

Explaining the scientific method (or: how scientists think) as a basis for further discussions on the podcast.

After talking about a hack that was caused by Microsoft's cloud email service last week, we now look at the next infosec disaster in recent months: How Microsoft stood by as hundreds of thousands of their customers' on-premise Exchange mail servers got breached and totally owned.

Analysing the SolarWinds hacker attack, which has been called the largest data breach the world has ever seen. Was it actually that bad? I'm trying to put it in perspective and discuss some aspects that have been neglected by much of the mainstream coverage.

What is cyber war? Who engages in it, what consequences does it have? What's the difference to everyday hacker attacks? And does it actually exist?

How the coronavirus scare leads to irrational fear, which leads to victim blaming. Which then gets institutionalised as discrimination against those who get sick or might get sick. The German government is well on its way with its digital immunity passport, powered by erstwhile Nazi collaborators and blockchain quacks.

With a Raspberry Pi, a camera and some open source software, anyone can record, recognise and store number plates on mass. What does that mean for the privacy of car owners and passengers now and in the future?

Why does medical data not belong to the patients? What does that do to science and hospital care? Plus: Why Visa cancelled their bid to buy the fintech startup Plaid.

Should you leave WhatsApp because it is sending data to Facebook? And what about Matrix? Does a federated protocol actually have a chance to replace messengers like WhatsApp?

Today, the podcast turns one year old. To celebrate, I answer AMA-style questions from the show's producers. It's a bit of a change of pace, but at the end of it, you will know your host much better.

How a number of couch investors ruined some Wall Street guys using a mobile app. And why the Wall Street guys really don't care. And what it means for the future.

It looks like you've had an accident! Every new car sold in the EU has a black box in it that will activate the car's microphone and call emergency services in the event of a crash, supplying them with the car's location. A system that's ripe for explotation as spyware.

Donald Trump has left the White House and Joe Biden is now President. What does that mean for the future of the US and beyond? I look back at what happened with Trump and forward at the future with my guest Michael Mullan-Jensen.

After an angry mob stormed the US Capitol last week, Twitter and other social media companies embarked on an unprecedented power grab for control of the public's opinion.

A look back at the first year of this podcast, the topics covered and how the show changed with them.

Ever since the Cold War, intelligence services and their sympathisers in Western governments have worked tirelessy to prevent everyday citizens from utilising effective encryption to shield their lives from prying eyes. When the Clipper chip failed, these people switched to influencing legislation to get what they want. And now they are at it again.

A conversation about how Joe Biden won the election, how Trump lost it, what the media had to do with it and what this means for the future.

The German Bundestag is about to debate far-reaching legislation that will permanently enshrine coronavirus-related restrictions into law. In this episode, I examine this law's privacy and civil liberty implications.

Police raids across Europe to fight hate speech sound like a good idea. But what does 'hate speech' actually mean? And does fighting it actually help? Or will it endanger your freedom of speech and maybe even your privacy?

In a timely, and very long episode, fellow critical thinker Michael Mullan-Jensen and I discuss the upcoming US Presidential Election, how voters might be manipulated to change its outcome and what it means from a privacy perspective.

As Germany is heading into another lockdown, our government now wants to search our homes without a warrant and due process. Why? Because they suspect illegal partying is going on. Also: More on the Cyberbunker case.

German prosecutors have opened criminal proceedings against the administrators of the bulletproof hoster Cyberbunker, which was raided by police last year. This is a landmark case for all hosting companies in Germany and should be of interest to anyone looking for privacy-oriented online services.

A new privacy law is being voted on next month in California. It might change the way internet privacy is dealt with in all of the US, maybe even around the world. Plus: Do Not Track is back. Maybe, this time around, it will actually work.

The release of the UK's contact tracing app, a major Excel blunder, the current coronavirus situation in Germany and how we are being prepared for the Great Privacy Reset.

A discussion on what's going on with privacy laws in the US and in post-Brexit Britain and a look at Amazon's latest push to spy on our living rooms.

An update on the Danish intelligence scandal, Google's plans to learn all about the things you get up to in hotel rooms and how to find out if your favourite podcast is tracking your listening habits.

Immunity passports are a very old idea. And they have many problems, not all of them directly privacy-related. What are these problems and why are they, if anything, made worse by digital technology?

In Germany, a large cloud service provider for restaurants was revealed to be horribly unsecure, possibly leaking tens of thousands of addresses, collected for mandatory coronavirus contact tracing, to the public.

A recent scandal involving the military intelligence service in Denmark once again clearly demonstrates how important whistleblowers are to the general public.

Current research suggests that my initial hunch was correct: Measuring distances between phones via Bluetooth signals doesn't work well. If at all.

By explaining what socialism means in its historical context, I aim to give listeners a better understanding of what the alternatives to capitalism are. Which is important for further discussions of the surveillance economy.

The European Court of Justice has declared that the current measures for the exchange of private data between the EU and the US do not satisfy the data protection rights of EU citizens and are therefore illegal.

The story of how police cracked the encryption of the EncroChat phone is not only important to criminals who used these devices, but also an interesting case study of how such systems are attacked in practice.

German fintech darling Wirecard has collapsed among allegations of fraud, money laundering and very underhanded practices. But the things coming to light about the company and its executive Jan Marsalek now are even more egregious than anything we had heard so far.

The EARN IT Act is on its way to become law in the US and might make it impossible for service providers to keep effective end-to-end encryption in place for their products. And with that, it seems the Crypto Wars are back in full swing.

German police has started using coronavirus tracing lists from restaurants for criminal investigations. A look at the limits of the GDPR and other data protection regulations in the face of what everyone alleges is an overriding health crisis.

A discussion of the current state of journalism around the world and how it impacts all of our lives with my good friend and fellow critical thinker Michael Mullan-Jensen.

As things are slowly returning to some semblance of normalcy in Germany, this episode of the podcast reflects on how our perception of privacy and of our rights and freedoms has changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

German payment processing company Wirecard is currently falling apart under a criminal fraud investigation after 1.9 billion euros went missing. What is lesser known, is that the company, which got its start by processing gambling and porn payments, also apparently ran psychological warfare campaigns to silence whitleblowers.

Yesterday, Germany launched its coronavirus tracing app. I discuss how the app was tested and why it was launched so soon after having been finished.

How social smartphone apps like Strava, Polar and even Untappd can leak sensitive information about highly secret subjects by logging the runs and rides we take and even the beers we drink.

Taking a close look at the source code of Germany's contact tracing app, which was recently published by SAP and associated developers.

A plea to forgo thinking in categories such as ethnicity or skin colour. We can only reach a just civil society by understanding that we are all in this together. There is no privacy without humanity.

SAP has released the first bits of source code for the German coronavirus tracing app. In the meantime, the public is being distracted to get mad at anything but the actual causes of their problems.

Almost a quarter of US consumers have given a company access to their bank account that they probably have never heard of. This shadowy company, which is collecting all of this data on financial transactions is called Plaid and they are coming for your bank account next.

Another update on the use of coronavirus tracing apps all around the world and on crazy things happening on the ground in the containment zones of Europe.